Why do people continue to say fossil & nuclear energy are cheaper than solar?

Great Debates
1

There is this widely held belief that providing X Gigawatts of power is cheaper when it is done via coal and nuclear power than when it is done with solar and wind power.

This is because we only calculate a portion of the cost involved in nuclear and fossil fuel power. Even worse is true for the fuels industry.

The logic of saying that nuclear and fossil fuel power is cheaper than solar and wind power is like saying it’s cheaper for you to dump your trash in someone else’s yard than to pay to have it hauled from the bin on your driveway. You just moved your costs onto someone else. The costs, however, are still there.

The monthly bill you pay for electricity does not include the externalities involved with these industries, four examples of which I will point out:

  1. There is a nuclear meltdown, which is, thankfully, rare, but also horribly expensive when it happens;
  2. The cost of dealing with the pollution from coal-powered plants;
  3. The costs of dealing with air pollution/smog, oil spills, global warming, ocean acidification, and other known perils that come with petroleum;
  4. The pollution of water supplies by the natural gas industry, particularly when they start fracking.

Obviously it is difficult to hold a company eternally liable for the damage it causes, but this does not nullify the fact that the damage is continuing to be done.

For instance, a nuclear accident with lingering health issues, water, soil and food contamination, may present problems that persist for many years after and many millions or billions of dollars beyond the point where the culpable nuclear reactor company has supposedly paid its reparations. We will all pay the price for these issues, be it radioactive cars arriving in Chile or the 985,000 premature deaths that resulted from Chernobyl, including 60,000 deaths by cancer.

Coal power plants will never be held liable for the full magnitude of damage done when “clean coal” sludge spills wipe out 400 acres of land - but that does not nullify the costs that are incurred by the affected citizens, the nearby businesses and environment itself. Coal power plants will not be held liable for the acid rain or mercury poisoning of streams and fish around the world. That cost is taken up by you and me.

British Petroleum is fighting to avoid paying for the full extent of the damage its recent massive oil spill wrought upon the Gulf Coast. But just because there are limitations to their liability and they may win even more in court, does not nullify the billions of dollars in damage they have caused in the form of lost lives, injuries, health problems, ecological damage, dead fish and birds, ruined businesses and other problems that are a direct consequence of their negligence at the Deepwater Horizon well. These costs are real, and society pays them in exchange for oil-based energy. BP will never pay its fair share of the cost of smog, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide pollution, global warming and ocean acidification that is caused by the burning of their oil/gasoline. You and I pay that price instead. It is a hidden price that doesn’t show up on the books, but it is a very real price and it only fails to show up because of society’s negligence. Think I’m wrong? Come back and tell me that the next time there’s a Spare the Air day. They usually happen during the summer.

Clean, cheap natural gas? Not hardly, on either count. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, entails the use of chemicals that poison water supplies. Plus the leaking of natural gas into the water supply can have some interesting consequences. Who pays for that? Not the natural gas company. You pay for that. Especially if it puts you in the hospital.

The point is, there are a multitude of hidden costs involved in nuclear and fossil fuel-based energy production, that you are forced to pay but not in an obvious way, since it doesn’t appear on your monthly bill.

Anyone who says that fossil fuel or nuclear power is cheaper than solar energy, and who actually cites figures, has automatically failed to factor in the cost you pay when oil causes smog and ruins the oceans and gives your kid asthma and lifelong health problems, when nuclear accidents irradiate your water and soil and cause cancer, when fracking makes your water catch on fire, or when coal power makes fish too poisonous to eat and ruins water supplies. These hidden dangers, these costs that are not enumerated and calculated into the price of fossil and nuclear energy, are the REAL costs you pay for that energy.

The REAL cost of solar and wind power, on the other hand, are mostly paid up front. The pollution generated by these power sources ranks somewhere between very little and none, with 99% of all lifetime pollution happening at production time.

So the debate is… why are nuclear and fossil fuel proponents being so dishonest about the REAL cost of the electricity these options generate?

2

I’m a fan of renewables, but this statement seems as though it can’t possibly be true. The production of solar panels, for example, involves intensively refining silicon and other materials, which is energy intensive and produces toxic waste products. At the end of their life, the units must be properly disposed of or recycled, neither of which is free.

I mention this only because the thrust of your argument is that others are brushing costs under the carpet - which means you can’t really do this yourself.

3

Its interesting that you fail to mention the heavy metal components contained in solar panels and the nasty side effects that occur over time when they degrade.

Which pretty much undermines your entire thesis as far as solar goes.

4

Largely because it’s very difficult to evaluate these “real” costs or even decide what should be included. Most evaluations have a fair dose of politics and bullshit mixed into them. I note for example that you picked the figures from the rather problematic Yablokov report from your wiki cite for Chernobyl deaths, rather than the WHO, Torch or Greenpeace reports, all of which are significantly lower. How do you justify that particular choice, other than by pandering to your own prejudices? Is that “dishonesty?”

5

Ok, I’m game - how can we quantify that?

6

The idea that any number lower than worst case scenario is the result of a cover-up?

7

What’s problematic about the Yablokov report?

Also, you said I picked the Yablokov report instead of the TORCH report - what made you accuse me of this even though in my post, I did in fact mention the 60,000 deaths by cancer, which is in fact from the Torch report? Look up “including 60,000 deaths by cancer” in my OP. “Instead” is apparently not a word that means what you think it does, as I did include both the Yablokov figure and the TORCH figure.

According to Greenpeace, which you brought up, the loss of life because of Chernobyl was 200,000. 200,000 isn’t 985,000 but that’s still a hell of a lot of deaths.

So let’s go with 60,000 deaths by cancer, there’s a lowball figure. How much would that be in insurance payouts and restitution?

8

Like I said, I’m game - how much pollution does this generate, versus the pollution generated by nuclear and fossil fuel (oil, coal, natural gas) power plants?

9

Chernobyl is simply an irrelevancy, since that only could happen at all because of the extremely bad design of the plant. It’s simply not an accident that can happen at plants with a better design.

Besides, I’ve never noticed much discussion one way or the other about which costs more; the important point about nuclear is that it can do the job and solar can’t.

Also, building and maintaining the things involves burning fossil fuels for the process of building and maintaining the solar power plant - and quite a bit of it, since they need to be huge since solar isn’t a very good source of energy. Plus, there’s all the land you need to use up. Which is even more land than you might think since using solar as your primary energy source means you need a solar power capacity not equal to what we have now, but multiple times what we have now since solar is so unreliable. You’ll need enough solar so that you still get enough energy even during winter, on cloudy days, and enough to tide you overnight. Solar scales up poorly.

10

You seem keen on figures and being concerned about data, good for you. Like to take it a little further?

Put these technologies in descending order of deaths per TWh generated.

hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, biomass, nuclear.

11

In your costing for solar, are you including storage to handle the night loads? The most common storage is lead acid batteries. I don’t suppose a cite is needed to claim that these have lots of lead and lots of acid. With care they might last 10 years.

Few other battery technologies compare with the charge/discharge efficiency of lead acid. Most of the improvements in batteries these days are toward higher power and energy density, and longer life…but you may only get back half or less of the energy it takes to charge them.

For large scale storage, sodium-sulfur is looking feasible. Big buildings full of hot molten sodium that bursts into flames when it gets wet…so no tsunamis, floods, or hurricanes allowed, unless you build really strong, really expensive buildings.

12

Dunno - I just don’t think you can ignore or downplay it, if you’re holding your opponents to account for its equivalent on their side.

13

Mangetout, the costs of disposing of wastes from manufacturing wind and solar components are included in the cost of the product.

I have linked to this World Nuclear Association report several times before. Yes, it is from a pro-nuclear cite but their presentation is cogent:

The last for Novely Bubble’s question.

I tried another take in this post:

14

Sure (assuming everything is properly regulated) - but that rolled-up cost also includes all sorts of other confounding factors.

Can we evaluate Le Jaquelope’s statement “The pollution generated by these power sources ranks somewhere between very little and none”, using only the ticket price of the item?

15

Um, think this over a bit. Yes it was a bad design but with new design there is a possibility of a lemon, especially if we get into trying to increase efficiencies by a radical new design. Also developing countries which can’t afford to play the import oil game, may have natural nuclear resources and may try to construct a nuke plant for power, this could lead to all sorts of extremely bad designed plants.

16

Wiki goes into some of it. Basically there has been a widespread drop in male lifespan across Belarus, Russia and Ukraine in both contaminated and uncontaminated areas, but the Yablokov report fails to account for this in its assessment of additional deaths attributed to Chernolbyl. Additionally some of the additional deaths attributed to Chernobyl are from diseases with no association with radiation exposure - cirrhosis of the liver, for example.

Your OP cited a wiki page giving various figures from various reports. I didn’t realise you had taken the 60,000 figure from the TORCH report as a subset of the deaths from the Yablokov report. My apologies. Possibly you were unware that all these reports are basically in conflict - e.g. the WHO report figure of 4000 (or 9000, depending how you read it) is the WHO estimate of the TOTAL number of deaths that will result from the Chernobyl accident. It looked to me like you had arbitarily chosen the highest death figure out of all the reports on the wiki page for your OP.

My point stands - it’s extremely difficult to evaluate all the externalities for just about anything or even decide what should really be counted. People trying to make the case for or against will select externalities very differently. Fossil fuel power doesn’t take the cost of AGW into account because historically, CO2 releases haven’t been regarded as harmful and putting a figure on what it should cost is very difficult. Fossil fuel power does pay for sulphur and mercury scrubbing, disposal of fly ash etc. and indirectly it pays for mining pollution and deaths via the price paid for coal. Nuclear power likewise pays for insurance to cover accidents and does pay a premium for future waste disposal, but whether these are realistic evaluations of those costs is very debateable. Wind doesn’t have much in the way of externalities but there are some - pollution from rare earth metal mining used for the permanent magnet generators for example. We don’t the story for solar externalities yet because the winning technology hasn’t come to the forefront yet. Covering thousands of square miles of desert with solar panel has to have some kind of effect on the desert ecosystem, but nothing anyone is likely to care about.

17

A lot of interesting and surprising data in that second link. It’s depressing that advanced coal works out more expensive than traditional coal despite a pretty big fuel efficiency improvement. I might have a read of the source documents to get to the bottom of that.

The low cost of wind and high cost of solar are both readily apparent, although I still regard large-scale solar as experimental and any associated figures highly uncertain. The relative cost of nuclear compared to other sources is higher in the USA than in the UK, for reasons that aren’t clear.

18

And just to stake my colours firmly to the fence.

I’m neither strongly pro or anti either side. I think it is likely that fossil fuels, nuclear and other renewables will form part of the energy mix for some decades to come.

There is no perfect solution as has already been made clear via some of the links in this thread.

I seem to be one of the few that actually like wind turbines, but I also realise that backups and a base load is needed. Similar issues come with solar though perhaps that may be susceptible to a quantum leap in performance and economies of scaled production.

I like hydro but the risks of catastrophic disaster are on a par with nuclear and suitable sites are limited.

The Russians own the gas, the middle east et al have the oil, and everyone has the coal but it is the biggest killer of all and needs another leap in technology to make it cleaner and efficient.

I do really try to objective in these issues and I keep coming back to nuclear as a stop-gap with money ploughed into developing better solutions and make them economically viable.

19

I’d like to see that.

I’m not at all interested in downplaying anything. We need more accounting along these lines for all sources of power.

That’s why I chose two instead of one report, just in case one was not credible. The WHO report seems extremely lowballish, in retrospect; the opposite extreme of the Yablokov figures. I think we can call the TORCH/Greenpeace ones credible, right?

I’m more than game for factoring in these hidden costs for rare earth mining and the potential damage done to the desert ecosystem by solar panels, and the cost incurred by taking steps to mitigate this. Naturally, though, I imagine that rare earth mining costs and the money required to take steps to mitigate the environmental impact of alternative energy production will tend to go right into the up-front costs of construction. Maintenance costs, I imagine, are automatically factored into the cost as well.

Plus I’m sure there’s a lot of rare earth minerals used to build fossil fuel and nuclear energy systems. Magnets should be common in all these power plants.

My question is, what costs can actually be hidden regarding solar or wind power? I can imagine there would be some with the spoiling of desert ecosystems, and lead acid/sodium sulfur battery storage could result in leakage or explosion issues which could become “someone else’s” problem. Those two are big ones. But I’m all for factoring it in. Let’s put it all on the table! Let people see the REAL cost of energy. I’m quite sure that when this is done, solar and wind power are not as relatively expensive after all this is done, as it is perceived to be now.

20

I think we can say that those costs have least already been monetized.