Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: nuclear power: abundant? and cheap?



"Edmiston, Mike" wrote:

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.

OK.

It is uncommon for people to do the same thing with fossil fuels.

It is conventional but IMHO unwise to use the term
"fossil" as the opposite of "nuclear". In my view,
uranium should be considerd a fossil fuel. The word
"fossil" means "dug up", from the Latin. We would be
better off using more-precise terms, such as "carbon-based
fuels" versus "uranium" et cetera.

Perhaps even more important is the distinction between
renewable (or inexhaustible) and non-renewable (and
readily exhaustible) fuels. This is important, because
people have been led to believe that uranium is so
plentiful as to be virtually inexhaustible, but this
is not true. When used the way it is actually used, it
is not even very abundant. It is common, but foolish,
to overlook this problem.

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.

That's astonishing.

We don't figure the cost of health problems from breathing SO2, or breathing ozone from the NO2 that's created by burning.

The NEI alone has an annual budget of something like 30 million
dollars that gets spent on advertising and lobbying. You would
think they would want to publicize an estimate of the full-cycle
cost of producing electricity from coal.
http://www.nei.org/

The same goes for green-power advocates.

Is it really true that neither they nor anyone else has ever
done this calculation? This seems like such a good question;
is it really true that nobody has tried to answer it?
I googled for over an hour and didn't find anything useful.
Totally astonishing.

========================

Rick Tarara wrote:

In the end--once we either decide to stop using fossil
fuels or run out--we had better have something like
fusion working ...

What means "something like" fusion? There are precisely
zero fusion-based power plants right now. Thirty years
ago they said it would be about 20 years before the first
such plant would be built. Now they say it will be about
20 years before the first such plant will be built. That's
pretty slow progress. And the US applied an 80% budget cut
to fusion research a few years ago, so progress might get
even slower.

... or we may have to go to exotic things like space-based
solar collection satellites which will run to really big bucks.

How big?

If you could meet the US electricity demand with something
costing a trillion dollars, that would be reasonably attractive.
At current prices the cells alone would cost you a trillion
dollars, but prices have come down by a factor of three in
the last ten years, and presumably there would be economies
of scale to be had. Still, the budget is tight. On the
third hand, it wouldn't take much of a tightening in the
non-renewable carbon-fuels market to tip the scales.


==============================

I did yet another calculation. Take the cost of the
Chernobyl accident (estimated 200 billion dollars)
and add it to the price of nuclear power sold in the
Ukraine. It adds about 13 cents per kwh. Divide that number
by 3 if you want to spread the cost over the entire former
Soviet Union. This assumes a 30-year payback period (but is
not very sensitive to this assumption). This also assumes
a discount rate of 5% per annum, which seems generous; I
wouldn't lend money to the nuclear power industry at that
rate.

That may explain why the nuclear-power industry is uninsurable.
The cost of accidents is so high that it would price nuclear
energy out of the market.

This is _not_ comparable to the airline industry. Take
the cost of the WTC atrocity (estimated 40 billion dollars)
and add it to the cost of air transportation (playing by
the same rules as above) and you get something like $5 per
embarkation for 30 years. That's a bad thing, no doubt
about it, but it's not infinitely bad.