It is common for people to try to ascertain the total cost of nuclear power. Those doing so typically are trying to show how expensive nuclear truly is.
It is uncommon for people to do the same thing with fossil fuels. Basically, we don't know the true overall cost of burning fossil fuels. These costs certainly include health costs, environmental costs, and might also include climate-change costs.
We don't figure the cost of health problems from breathing SO2, or breathing ozone from the NO2 that's created by burning. Incidentally, the whole eastern United States from the Mississippi to the east coast is out of compliance with the new ozone standards. It's going to cost a fortune to deal with this, and the culprit is cars and power plants... i.e. burning fossil fuels. It will cost direct dollars to reduce the ozone, or it will cost indirect dollars to deal with the asthma and other pulmonary effects of not controlling the ozone.
In northeastern US and Canada we still have an acid rain problem. Worse, we don't know what to think about the greenhouse effect. If the greenhouse effect is real, and if our consumption of fossil fuels is really the culprit, then the cost of using fossil fuels could be enormous... way more than the cost of nuclear. But how do you assess the cost of man-made global climate changes?
Although the cost of burning fossil fuels has mostly gone unnoticed by the public, some isolated communities have taken notice. Here in Ohio, near the Ohio River, American Electric Power has essentially bought a whole town because of the health effects of the air pollution from the plant. That would be one way to drive up the cost of fossil-generated power... buy up all the houses and land downwind from the plant. But the cost of those emissions doesn't stop at some arbitrary boundary determined by where the power company quits buying houses.
A new power plant is proposed about 30 miles from my home that will burn half coal and half garbage. People are so power hungry that they have offered cheap land and tax rebates to help attract the plant to come here. This means the new plant is not going to be producing energy at the true cost because it will get "governmental help" just like people claim the nuclear industry gets. Worse, local people don't get the tax revenue they need to keep the infrastructure going (e.g. it appears the local public will absorb the cost of a new reservoir to provide the water to feed the cooling tower). Additionally, the local public will breath worse air, and we will contribute to the greenhouse effect. And the power generated probably won't even be used here (although it will relieve grid loading and that eventually helps the power situation here).
I am especially worried about all the gas turbines being brought on line. Natural-gas gas-turbine power plants are the cheapest to bring on-line because they are simple to build and don't require as stringent air permits because they are inherently cleaner than coal. However, they not only produce CO2 to exacerbate the greenhouse problem, they also use a fossil fuel that is needed for other things such as home heating. Around here, most people heat their homes and hot water with natural gas. We have seen our natural gas prices triple in the last couple years. We have also been warned of possible shortages. Yet we seem to be encouraging the building of gas turbine electricity generation plants. I think we are shooting ourselves in the foot on this one.
The bottom line is that we don't know the true costs of any of our sources of electricity, yet we are so power hungry that we are demanding more power all the time, and therefore we are forging ahead with new fossil plants without the level of thought that ought to go into a national energy plan.
Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D. Phone/voice-mail: 419-358-3270
Professor of Chemistry & Physics FAX: 419-358-3323
Chairman, Science Department E-Mail edmiston@bluffton.edu
Bluffton College
280 West College Avenue
Bluffton, OH 45817