A lot of people, including John McCain, think nuclear power is the best solution to the US’s energy problems.
However, the cost of nuclear power has been skyrocketting. From 2000 through October 2007, nuclear power plant construction costs — mainly materials, labor and engineering — have gone up 185%.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/02/nuclear_power_price/
Last November, Nuclear Engineering International ran a story entitled ‘For some utilities, the capital costs of a new nuclear power plant are prohibitive.’
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2047917
Duke Energy won’t even reveal the cost estimate for a proposed nuclear plant in the Carolinas because it’s so high.
http://www.newsobserver.com/business/story/1054171.html
According to some analysts, a reasonable estimate for levelized cost range of nuclear power is 12 to 17 cents per kilowatt hour lifetime. The California Public Utilities Commission estimates new nuclear plants would cost 15 cents per kWh before transmission and delivery costs.
In comparison, the same commission puts the current cost of concentrated solar thermal at 13 cents per kWh. And the cost could drop by as much as 20% within the next 10 years as the technology improves. And concentrated solar thermal has storage capacity, which means it can follow power demand, unlike nuclear, which produces constant energy output.
Jigar Shah, chief strategy officer of SunEdison, said he could guarantee delivery to Florida of more power with solar photovoltaics — including energy storage so the power was not intermittent — for less money than the nuke plants being constructed there cost.
According to the Bush Energy Department, Americans could get 300 gigawatts of wind by 2030 at a cost of 6 to 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, including the cost of transmission to access existing power lines.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/02/nuclear_power_price/index1.html
And the risk of nuclear construction projects going into default and costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars is very high.
http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/09/11/mccains-nuclear-energy-plan-may-cost-315-billion/
So why should we build any more nuclear power plants when they’re more expensive, more risky, and not as clean as renewables like wind and solar thermal?
Cactus Jack – nuclear receives far more subsidies than renewables.
Bob – nuclear plants take far longer to build than renewable energy plants.
eric c – the IPCC advocates a 2% increase in nuclear vs. a 15% increase in renewable energy by 2030.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report#Mitigation_in_the_short_and_medium_term_.28until_2030.29
1. Yes, capital costs for nuclear are high. But fuel costs are very small. Expensive to build, but cheap to run.
2. Much of the capital cost penalty for nuclear is societal, not technological. In other words, avoidable with policy change.
3. There are no significant improvements on the horizon for concentrated solar. Each piece considered alone is already a mature technology. How much more efficient can you make a mirror? There may be improvements for PV, but that’s more expensive than nuclear.
4. Nuclear receives more subsidies than renewables only on a gross basis. On a per-watt basis, renewables are subsidized many times more than nuclear.
5. Nuclear power has advantages that solar and wind do not, specifically near 100% availability.
6. Nuclear has a lower carbon footprint that solar, about as low as wind.
7. Coal burning is the worst, and I mean WORST contributor to global warming on the planet. Period. We still get 33% of our energy from coal, and there’s a reason for that. It’s RELIABLE and AVAILABLE. Yes, it’s killing the planet. But that’s not factored into its cost of use.
Currently, nuclear power is the only available source for reliable, available baseload electric generation that can realistically hope to replace coal within the next decade. Hydro is already fully subscribed. Solar, wind, and geothermal are regional and intermittant resources. That doesn’t mean useless, it just means limited in scope. So yes, let’s use wind and solar where we can. Where we can’t, use nuclear.
15 responses to Why would we build any more nuclear power plants?
The cost of EVERYTHING has gone up because of the weak dollar and global growth.
And by the way the cost to build power plants isn’t borne by the taxpayer.
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One thing you didn’t mention is the areal energy density. Solar and especially wind power require huge amounts of land compared to nuclear power. Have you seen some of the large wind farms? The one in San Gorgonio Pass is a garish monstrosity. A few of those are tolerable, but too many and we’ll wonder whatever happened to our visual landscape.
I think it’s really difficult to compare the actual costs of different types of power. Practically no nuclear power plants have been built in the US in the past couple decades, so there is no economy of scale and much of the cost may be due to regulation.
I’m not necessarily for a wholesale increase in nuclear power, but are you really sure that a nation based on wind power would be better?
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Wind is fine on a windy day and solar isn’t too useful on a starry night. Nuclear is expensive in part because of the risk that they end up having to pay for ambulance chasing lawyers and green law suits. The left makes nuclear unviable and then asks why use it when it is expensive. That reminds me of Nancy Pelosi’s drilling bill that is written to ensure not one oil well is drilled. It is simply another demonstration that the left is not serious about energy policy and it should not be entrusted to them. Don’t you think Jigar has a vested interest in solar power? Not exactly an unbiased expert.
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Large scale wind farms (the ones needed to produce that much energy) cause more local changes than a nuclear reactor.
Nucelar reactor prices are up because of the price of metals such as uranium. Fortunately unlike oil, Uranium supplies are estimated to be very high (current reserves are low though). Where oil is constantly being explored for, Uranium exploration goes in waves and is starting to heat up, as such more reserves will be found and prices will drop.
As it is right now, the cost from a CANDU Twin ACR-700 LUEC is about $32/mWh or $0.032/kWh. The cost of a CANDU Twin ACR-1000 LUEC is about 10% less. Which is still 2-3 times cheaper than wind power in 22 years time.
Not to mention that aside from its moderator and coolant being the same thing (eliminating the change of a Chernoybl, Chelybinsk or Three Mile Island) the ACR design uses Gadolinium nitrate which induces introduces negative reactivity.
As for storage of spent fuel (the largest problem facing the nuclear industry). Vetrification and deep plutonic burial will produce a water insoluable substance that essentially locks radiation from the outside environment.
Interestingly enough, one of the fathers of modern environmentalism (James Lovelock) admits in his newest book "The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity" that we should embrace Nuclear Energy as the energy of the future (but still as a transitional energy until the invention of Fusion Reactors).
That book in itself is actually a good insight (comparing wind, solar, tidal and nuclear) as to why nuclear is the clear choice winner of the big 4. Siteing how wind and solar are still currently subsidized.
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AECL
Personal experience in alternative energies
Self admitted Energy Critic
I suspect the cost of nuclear power plants are real engineering cost estimates based on detailed studies and more importantly experience whereas the cost of solar thermal power are relatively back of the envelope calculations (possibly not even by experienced engineering contractors) as plants have not been built before on any scale and could be ad drift by a factor of two or three. To get real engineering estimates one has to spend time and money and the phenomena of over optimistic estimates for new types of developments is well recognised. This would particularly apply to the energy storage aspects.
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Engineering experience
alternate energy production sucks! so use nuclear until we can get FUSION
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Democrats aren’t noted for change, whether good or bad. Their greatest attribute is to do nothing, but raise taxes. Pass bad legislation such as NAFTA, and pretend it was the other sides fault. If your worried about escalating cost association. Then have it all outsourced and have everyone move to China or India.
forth header…………
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http://www.democrats.org/page/community/tag/Nuclear
Even though CSP has a limited storage potential of latent heat, the high density population centers on the North East coast would require massive transmission lines running to the southwestern US. These transmission lines would loose to much energy and would emit huge EM fields, I don’t see how you could feasibly supply population centers such as New York city with a steady flow of electricity generated by a CSP source. It’s in the best interest of the United States government to keep economic centers such as New York city running in the future, so the aging Nuclear Power plants must be replaced and expanded to keep up with the population growth. Nuclear plants in both the US and Europe statistically have the least amount of environmental impact of any other power source.
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Because we need a bridge to truly renewable power, and fast. One that can power a massive fleet of hydrogen/electric cars. Nothing else an do that but nuclear.
A reasonable goal is to build a bunch fast, run them for one plant lifetime, and replace them with true renewables. 30-50 years.
EDIT – For the very large amounts of energy we need right now (and for hydrogen/electric vehicles), nuclear power capacity takes less time/money to build than renewable capacity. We don’t need gigawatts, we need terrawatts.
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We need to solve the problem of global warming using what is proven and nuclear power is proven to be able to handle all the energy needs of a country whilst wind and solar are not (if anything they’ve been proven not to be able to do so).
The costs of nuclear are pretty well known so as long as the regulations aren’t changing constantly (i.e. pick good ones at the start and leave them) and baseless legal challenges can’t delay construction then the cost can be pretty well known (and double the projected cost is pretty common anyway, not just in nuclear so a 185% increase in cost is not really that bad), nuclear also has very high capital costs while having very low operating costs (which of course means that nuclear plants are best run all the time and often practically give away power during off-peak, ideal if you think off-peak (when solar thermal won’t be supplying any power) is when everyone is going to charge their electric cars).
Cost estimates from advocates of ‘renewables’ whatever they are have often tended to be nonsense when looked at closely.
"Jigar Shah, chief strategy officer of SunEdison, said he could guarantee delivery to Florida of more power with solar photovoltaics — including energy storage so the power was not intermittent — for less money than the nuke plants being constructed there cost."
Unless those nuclear plants are gigantic Pu238 RTGs I highly doubt solar PV could undercut them (Photovoltaics is about the most expensive power source out there).
Besides, the energy storage technology needed for that has not been proven on a large scale so it can not be guaranteed to be available.
Back in the ’70′s there was some debate about this with some people saying that switching to nuclear would be a good idea and others saying that ‘renewables’ would be better, the debate back then was ‘won’ by those who wanted ‘renewables’ and energy policy has been set largely by them and look where we are now?
Still burning coal along with lots of natural gas.
Had the nuclear build continued all throughout the ’80′s and ’90′s the US would’ve pretty much dealt with the biggest source of it’s global warming (and the rest of the world would’ve probably followed).
We’ve given ‘renewables’ a chance and so far all we’ve had from them is failure to replace fossil fuels whilst France has demonstrated that nuclear can actually replace fossil fuels (and even today the US still gets most of its clean energy from nuclear).
In fact if you have a look at countries that have low CO2 emissions from their electricity sector what you find is that they tend to have high levels of nuclear and hydro and low levels of fossil fuels with the amount of wind and solar being very low in all countries (even Denmark stopped once they reached the point at which they weren’t able to sell the wind power to Norway for pumped storage which is about all that wind is good for on a grid without new technology we do not have).
As for why I’ve been quoting ‘renewables’, it’s because I treat it as a meaningless word used to refer to politically correct power sources.
In terms of risk, the biggest risk that could be taken in terms of energy policy is not to build nuclear power plants as nothing else we have right now can do the job required.
From an environmental point of view nuclear actually has a big advantage in that it is very concentrated, it uses energy that nature wouldn’t be using (as opposed to environmental energy sources like wind, solar and hydro which have to take energy from the natural environment) and it also has about a third of the cost devoted to safety systems (which do give it a very good safety record, much better than any fossil fuel and probably better than wind). Hydro electricity (which is actually useful) involves massive environmental devastation to build the dam while wind and solar need a lot of land whilst a nuclear reactor can be put pretty much anywhere without using much land (it’s possible to bury one in your basement).
Oh and CO2 emissions of nuclear are of the same order of magnitude as wind and much less than solar PV despite the fact that nuclear is reliable and wind and solar aren’t.
Now this isn’t to say we shouldn’t be looking at other power sources, Gen IV reactors (along with the Thorium cycle), Fusion and Space solar deserve serious R&D money and we can probably spare a bit for less likely technologies like ‘Clean’ coal, the other ‘renewables’ and the energy storage technologies needed to use them but ultimately we have to start solving the CO2 problem with what we’ve got and right now Gen III+ fission is all we’ve got.
Maybe we’ll end up with something better than nuclear fission and end up replacing our fission plants down the road but just because we can realistically foresee two energy sources better than fission (i.e. fusion and space solar) doesn’t mean we should wait for them when we have a problem to solve right now.
EDIT: A construction time of a few years is not out of line for major infrastructure (which is exactly what a power plant is, at least a useful one) and nuclear power plants have been built in that time frame (without cutting corners).
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http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power
http://carma.org/dig/show/world+country (notice how hydro and nuclear dominate electricity production in the countries with the cleanest grids? some geothermal where it works and biomass in developing countries the only exceptions (along with what seems to be bad data in the case of Finland)).
Because nuclear power works. Unlike anything ever promoted by you greenshirts.
I’d go for tidal, and I’d go for more hydroelectric. But solar and wind are both a waste of time, and obscenely expensive.
Much of the high cost of nuclear energy is tied up in getting permits and jumping through flaming hoops erected by people who hope they never happen. Get rid of some of that fiasco, and it would be much much cheaper. And don’t think that it’s really that "high cost" nuclear power plants are extremely good revenue generators for utility companies, and expensive things aren’t good revenue generators.
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1. Yes, capital costs for nuclear are high. But fuel costs are very small. Expensive to build, but cheap to run.
2. Much of the capital cost penalty for nuclear is societal, not technological. In other words, avoidable with policy change.
3. There are no significant improvements on the horizon for concentrated solar. Each piece considered alone is already a mature technology. How much more efficient can you make a mirror? There may be improvements for PV, but that’s more expensive than nuclear.
4. Nuclear receives more subsidies than renewables only on a gross basis. On a per-watt basis, renewables are subsidized many times more than nuclear.
5. Nuclear power has advantages that solar and wind do not, specifically near 100% availability.
6. Nuclear has a lower carbon footprint that solar, about as low as wind.
7. Coal burning is the worst, and I mean WORST contributor to global warming on the planet. Period. We still get 33% of our energy from coal, and there’s a reason for that. It’s RELIABLE and AVAILABLE. Yes, it’s killing the planet. But that’s not factored into its cost of use.
Currently, nuclear power is the only available source for reliable, available baseload electric generation that can realistically hope to replace coal within the next decade. Hydro is already fully subscribed. Solar, wind, and geothermal are regional and intermittant resources. That doesn’t mean useless, it just means limited in scope. So yes, let’s use wind and solar where we can. Where we can’t, use nuclear.
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I can not add anything to this I just wanted to comment that this is the most interesting question and answers I have seen on Yahoo Answers for a very long time and to say thank you to all.
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You like to quote the IPCC as saying they are the authoritative experts on all subject matter. Well the IPCC disagrees with you. They say nuclear power is the way to go.
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No one is mentioning the great possibility of disaster when it comes to not only storing and disposing of the waste from these nuclear power plants, but what about the possibility of an accident like Chernobyl. No… seriously, google it. It will change how you feel about nuclear energy. And now we are watching Japan scramble to avoid a major disaster. Is all of this worth the risk? Really? The damage lasts for generations to come. And what about some nut just blowing up some of these plants. They have minimal security. They should have no fly zones above them at best. And let’s not forget the greedy lying folks in charge of getting rid of all that waste. Most times it’s dumped on the ground. We can’t depend on them to” DO the right thing” when it’s all about the bottom line, MONEY!
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