Excellent points. I did understate it.
I’m not one of the sneerers, mind you. I loved my Ram when it was my only car, but I’m fortunate to be in a position to have two. When I finally bother to move out of town so my wife can start her sheep farm that she’s been planning for years (probably as soon as the kidlet is big enough that she’ll have time for it), next car I’m buying is a Silverado 3500. =P Same with family trips–and again, I’m in a good place with that when I can pick up the phone and say “Hey, dad, the guys wanna take a road trip, can I trade the Jetta for your Suburban for a week?” Without access to that kind of stuff, and with a use for it, there’s no problem with an SUV.
I continue to reserve the right to be amused/dispirited by turns by the buddy of mine who drives an Escalade, as a single petless guy with no equipment-using hobbies except going to LAN parties–and even then, we typically carpool in the Jetta 'cause he hates parking it in unfamiliar places. 
Yeah, my Neon (my commuter) is literally shaking itself apart at this point, but I’ll drive it till it dies if I have to… and if it does, I might take the excuse to get a CR-Z anyway.
And more and more things for the Luddite pro-nuclear, pro-fossil fuel naysayers to claim is inadequate for our needs.
We don’t need 40 years. progress is made all the time in science and renewables. We will have a better answer before we build another nuke plant.
Even if renewables were to become 100x better literally overnight, there is no good reason to not build a few new Generation IV Fast Breeder-type reactors–if nothing else, one of their functions is to tremendously reduce the radioactivity and volume of waste generated by our existing thermal-neutron class reactors.
Can one of you guys find a cite for this that discusses energy density vs. weight… or, really, any technical specifications at all? Many of us in this thread are engineers–show us the specs, not the marketing glossy.
And the point that I have made in response is that in many, if not most cases, the renewables are “a better choice than fossil fuels on a global scale” so long as the true costs of the fossil fuels are accounted for.
If I make widgets and produce a ton of garbage making the widgets, I can’t just dump my garbage into the river that goes by my factory. I have to pay for it to be properly disposed of.
When utilities make the widget that is energy from fossil fuel however they are getting away just dumping their garbage into our biosphere and neither paying for its disposal or for the consequences of this dumping. It is a true cost of the product and ignoring it makes that product’s cost appear artificially low. But its low price is a fiction. It is that low price which is artificial.
Having the rest of us paying for that cost instead of that particular widgetmaker paying for it is subsidizing that widget and giving it an unfair market advantage. Monetize that cost and then let the market compete fairly.
You do appreciate that what people want to drive, what energy people want to buy, is influenced mightily by what they have to pay for it? As I discussed before, this is even true in the relatively inelastic oil market albeit not linearly so. If we continue to implicitly subsidize fossil fuels the way we have, people will continue to choose it based on that artificially low price. Monetize those very real costs (as was done in one of my cites above) and then they lose the competition in most circumstances. My preference is to monetize at the producer level with cap and trade since carbon tax is a non-starter, but until then subsidizing the alternatives that do not have those costs to even up the playing field is the next best thing.
To do otherwise is to perpetuate unfair competition and to distort the market to work against our own good.
The same principal applies to nuclear btw. The fact that nuclear has to compete with the implicitly subsidized fossil fuels is what makes for so little new nuclear in the EIA projections. Monetize the implicit costs and then nuclear can compete more fairly and you will see more plants coming on board. Until then we need to subsidize nuclear with loan guarantees, etc. Its only fair.
No reason? They take ten years to get ion line, cost zillions of dollars, produce expensive energy, they have to be backed by the taxpayer because they can not buy insurance and they create radioactive byproducts that can cause a lot of trouble.
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
They take ten years to get ion line,
[/QUOTE]
True, but there are reasons for those delays, and not all of them have to do with construction. Also, even by the optimistic DOE report linked earlier, wind won’t be to where nuclear is today until 2030…minimum. That’s more than 10 years away.
No, it costs billions of dollars. And guess what? Building a wind farm of comparable generation capacity will cost…billions of dollars. Building a solar farm of comparable generation capacity will cost…billions of dollars.
No, they produce very competitively priced energy when amortized over the life of the plant, and even factoring in the end of life stuff like decommissioning. You’ve been shown the data in the past and have just ignored it. Here is another cite (no idea how accurate it is, but you often toss in cites from bizarre places so I figured I’d just do it too, for the fun of it):
There are, of course, other studies like this, but all of the ones I’ve seen show nuclear as competitive with other forms of energy. This one seems skewed towards nuclear, and I don’t think it’s all that accurate, since others I’ve seen show the total costs of nuclear to be between 6-10 cents per kilowatt hour. Regardless, you are, again, wrong about nuclear being expensive power, compared to other forms.
They have to be backed by the tax payer because of the large up front capital costs. They can’t get insurance because of people like you and all the other anti-nuke crowd who don’t have a clue what ‘risk analysis’ is.
-XT
xtisme, another analysis, by the very pro-nuke World Nuclear Association, was already linked to in my post 362 and quoted from in 368. To repeat, the analysis they quoted stated that once implicit subsidies are factored in (the subsidies that I am trying to get Sam to acknowledge exist)
Now those are based on 2001 data. Since then the cost of wind had decreased. But OTOH the cost of getting wind up to 20% or above will include new transmission infrastructure, so it may creep back up again. But still … where there is adequate wind resource wind power will be cheaper in total real costs than is nuclear. Where we have good geothermal it will be and where solar resource is ample solar will become so. Where there are not good renewable resources nuclear will be cheaper. Once the implicit subsidies are monetized and actually paid for fossil fuel will rarely be cheapest; it’s cheapest out of pocket in the short term only because those implicit subsidies are not counted.
They ignore the costs of the plants. They ignore the cost overruns which are guaranteed.. They ignore the wasted land cost after the plants are decomissioned. They are in pretty expensive real estate. The cost of the radioactive rods and waste is a burden forever. Where does that cost show in the calculations?
It takes a lot of pretending to convince yourself Nukes are a good idea.
Okay, let’s take this from another angle -
Wiki has this wonderful collection of tables from various governmental sources that compare the levelized cost of new generation as might come on line in 2016. Yes, it’s wiki but they are just aggregating the original data for us.
This table summarizes the external costs that are currently implicitly subsidized.
Convert to the same units and add them up. Feel free to convert the Euros, Australian dollars, and pounds. They all seem to be saying the same information visavis relative positions so I’ll stick with the US report. Original source material here.
Conventional coal $0.0948/kWh and $0.12 to 0.17 with the external costs added.
Wind (on-shore) $0.097 and about $0.10 with external costs added. They use 34% as its capacity factor.
Geothermal $0.1017 and no listing for external but assumed minute.
Nuclear $0.1339 and about $0.14 with external costs added.
Advanced combined cycle natural gas $0.0631 and about $0.08 with external costs added in.
So again - where wind is a good resource, wind is cheaper than coal or nuclear. Not without issues but we’ve beaten that horse into the ground. But wind is not a great resource everywhere. Where it and geothermal are not well located nuclear is a competitive source, after the implicit subsidies are removed, with coal.
But for right now it is hard to compete with natural gas. Heck even with CCS on it, which presumably would lower its external costs more, its only $0.0893, and adding the same external costs as without CCS still puts it lower than wind. And it blows coal and nuclear out of the water.
What argues against a heavy reliance on natural gas? It is in limited supply and is expected to last for only several decades before having significant short supply. Between now and then its price may be subject to rapid change. Renewables and nuclear OTOH have less risk of future price volatility. You pay a bit more now but you have a price pretty much locked in for the next several decades and you are in a better place when it does get a bit tight. Plus some thought must be given the possibility that its external costs are actually much much higher than previously estimated, and may become higher yet as new sources are exploited.
To me these figures taken together argue for wind and geothermal where the resources are good, building to 20% wind by 2030, maybe a few percent of geothermal and solar as it gets cheaper, new and replacement nuclear for where renewables are not well located, and natural gas to take care of the sizable shortfall as we retire as many of the oldest dirtiest coal plants as we can. Then in 20 years we reassess where the technologies and cost structures have gotten to.
It occurs to me that ignorance about the Manhattan Project may be more widespread than I realized.
It was not your typical government grant. I was born and raised in the community that grew up around the Hanford nuclear facility, in SE Washington state. A farming village of a few hundred in 1941 was a company town of 50,000 a couple years later. It remained a company town until well into the 50’s, with the government providing all kinds of services. You lived in a rent-subsidized house, and you called the government for home repairs. Virtually the only jobs for a community of by then around a hundred thousand (three main towns and a few more smaller ones) were either the government nuclear research, development, and production, or service industries to serve the government employees — stores, gas stations, and the like. And for decades after that, it was still essentially a government town, but the work was contracted to companies like GE, Westinghouse, Douglas, etc.
My dad was a reactor operator, my mom worked in a chemistry lab. They wore radiation exposure badges to work every day. Every few weeks, a metal container appeared on our porch. Inside were paraphernalia for taking urine and stool samples, duly collected and put back on the porch for pickup.
Similar massive expansions took place at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, to name a couple places. Los Alamos in particular amassed the top physicists, engineers, and chemists in the country. You should read “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” to see what it was like there — some aspects sound more like what you would expect in the Soviet Union than the US. It simply couldn’t be done today.
It’s really hard to imagine how there would be a commercial nuclear industry today without that enormous jump start. It had to be worth hundreds of billions in today’s dollars.
Let me reiterate: one of the design functions of Fast Breeder reactors is that they can take the existing waste from current generation plants and use it as fuel, ultimately resulting in the waste mass being 3% of starting mass, and with significantly shorter half-lives (on the order of 100-500 years) of the resulting waste.
And I thus reiterate–building that type of plant should be done because it can clean up existing waste.
Reiterate to this guy. Liquid sodium cooled reactors are safer? None of them are safe.
http://pbadupws.nrc.gov/docs/ML1109/ML110900577.pdf Fermi almost took Detroit out. It never generated the power it promised and cost a ton to build. How does that affect the calculations of nuclear plant cost?
[QUOTE=gonzomax]
They ignore the costs of the plants. They ignore the cost overruns which are guaranteed.. They ignore the wasted land cost after the plants are decomissioned. They are in pretty expensive real estate. The cost of the radioactive rods and waste is a burden forever. Where does that cost show in the calculations?
[/QUOTE]
None of those things were ignored. Did you even bother reading the cites or looking at the data…or even just trying to follow the fucking debate? Why don’t you TRY and at least click on the links?
[QUOTE=DSeid]
xtisme, another analysis, by the very pro-nuke World Nuclear Association, was already linked to in my post 362 and quoted from in 368. To repeat, the analysis they quoted stated that once implicit subsidies are factored in (the subsidies that I am trying to get Sam to acknowledge exist)
[/QUOTE]
Yes, I remember…I just didn’t feel like slogging back through the thread to try and find it, so figured I’d do a quick Google search last night. The point is that however you calculate it, nuclear is not the over the top costs that gonzomax is trying to portray. It’s more expensive than some forms of energy, less than others. You say that wind can scale up to the same levels that we currently have for nuclear. You cite a report by the DOE that seems to back that up. But I’ve skimmed that report and it seems dubious that we could actually do that by 2030. Regardless, even if we do, we will be paying a lot of money to get us up to where we are TODAY with nuclear energy…assuming you are right and it both can and actually will be done. Time will tell on that I guess.
And I agree with the main thrust of your point here…in some places wind WILL be the best choice. In others it might be solar. In others nuclear might be the best choice. To take one of those things off the table because of unreasoned fear seems very stupid to me. That we are going to do it just means WE are, as a nation, stupid…and short sighted. What it will mean is that coal is going to continue to be our primary source of energy for the foreseeable future, even if you are 100% correct and we can get wind up to 20% of our electrical production by 2030.
-XT
I already knew FBRs were pretty much a bust everywhere they’ve been tried, but I didn’t know they caught on fire that often.
Another funny thing about the nuclear industry is how the operators make a big deal about how they pay for waste storage and decommissioning, but decommissioning always costs more than they allot for. For storage, they constantly re-rack all their “spent” fuel rods closer and closer together until they have absolutely no choice but to store them above ground in casks. They make taxpayers and electricity customers pay for waste storage and the long-term waste storage fund, and now they’re suing the taxpayers/government to get the money back, but not to pass that on to the taxpayers and customers. Nope. They’re just going to take the money, and make us pay for it all, all over again. Sweet scam they have running. We just keep on paying the nuclear operators for everything they do, everything they don’t do, and everything they screw up.
I sometimes wonder if nuclear utilities ever pay for anything at all. We sure do.
We pay so the execs, who always are special and do a great job, can get huge salaries and bonuses. Then when they retire , they get millions more. Our execs are so special.
That’s why we’re discussing Generation IV molten lead FBRs. Seriously, we talked about this earlier in the thread.
Interesting stuff.