Brookings Study Calls Solar, Wind Power the Most Expensive Fossil Alternatives 409
turkeydance (1266624) writes A new study [PDF] from the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, argues that using solar and wind energy may be the most expensive alternatives to carbon-based electricity generation, even though they require no expenditures for fuel.....Specifically, this means nuclear power offers a savings of more than $400,000 worth of carbon emissions per megawatt of capacity. Solar saves only $69,000 and wind saves $107,000. An anonymous reader points out that the Rocky Mountain Institute finds the Brookings study flawed in several ways, and offers a rebuttal.
Funny money (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Funny money (Score:5, Informative)
"$400,000 worth of carbon emissions", it says. What, monopoly money?
There are carbon emission markets that put a real price on CO2 emissions. These are currently priced under $10 / tonne. But this study used a value of $50 / tonne, without any justification, other than making their conclusions look more impressive.
Re:Funny money (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Brookings think tank take money from oil and gas interests?
The report is not really pro FF. It is more pro-nuke.
All the slants against making the switch to renewable energy seem determined to to thwart it any way they possibly can
They just show that current solar and wind projects don't make sense on a stand-alone basis. But they miss the point that these technologies are improving quickly. The cost of solar dropped 20% in the last couple years, and is expected to drop quite a bit more, due to both technological and manufacturing improvements. The cost of offshore wind is also falling, and we haven't even started to exploit stratospheric wind.
But they have a valid point that current subsidies for wind and solar are probably not very smart. It would be better to put that money into scientific research, and development of better manufacturing techniques, rather than just subsidizing something that doesn't make sense.
Re:Funny money (Score:5, Informative)
The cost of solar dropped 20% in the last couple years, and is expected to drop quite a bit more, due to both technological and manufacturing improvements.
FYI - the biggest reason for the price drop wasn't economies of scale, but because China flooded the unholy fuck out of the solar market [washingtonpost.com], in a bid to dominate it since manufacturing solar panels isn't all that technically complex (at least not when compared to most other things).
It used to cost around $3/Wp, and China's backing of SunPower, SunTech and similar ventures glutted the price down to ~$0.90/Wp; however, last I checked a couple of years ago (I used to work for SolarWorld) it still cost around $1.25/Wp to manufacture a 250W panel, and that's not counting margins slimmer than even a PC OEM enjoys.
Re:Funny money (Score:5, Informative)
It is a process called dumping and China has been hit with tarrifs because of it by the EU. The US is investigating also.
In case you didn't know, dumping is where you sell a product in a particular market below costs usually with the intent of harming the players already in that market.
No, it is a claim that has been made, investigated, and punished in some areas in Europe over a year ago [theguardian.com] and recently in the US.
The problem is their prices to not cover their costs. If a normal company did that, they would become bankrupt and fail into historical reference. When the Chinese companies do this, they are being supported by the Chinese government and as long as their government is willing to funnel money into them, they can sell cheaper than anyone can acquire the raw materials for- let alone produce and sell something from it.
Re: Funny money (Score:3, Insightful)
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Think about it this way. Nuclear supports the status quo - centralized production via corporations. Solar and wind kill the cash cow.
Re:Funny money (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar and wind kill the cash cow.
Solar, yes. Wind, no. Solar PV does not benefit much from scale, so roof-top units make sense. But efficient windmills are big, and getting bigger. The most efficient windmills have a hub height of over 100 meters, and multi-megawatt generators. These are not backyard units. The future of wind energy is in offshore installations, and stratospheric wind. Only big corporations have the capital for that.
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PV (photovoltaic) won't benefit much from scale, but some of the solar thermal options that use mirrors for heat that's then used for steam generation certainly do.
Solar thermal is dead. There are some existing plants, but no new plants are being built anywhere in the world. The cost of solar PV has fallen, and solar thermal is no longer competitive. While the cost of solar PV is expected to continue to fall, the cost of solar thermal is not. It is basically just a bunch of pipes and mirrors, so there really isn't much to improve.
Solar thermal has the advantage that the hot molten salt can be stored, and used to generate steam at night, thus providing round-the-cl
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Solar thermal still makes sense where the aim is to generate heat, rather than electricity. As a method of heating water (either for domestic or industrial purposes) it will always be tough to beat, boasting as it does a zero wastage conversion rate (because there is no conversion- you produce the desired end product straight away).
An awful lot of energy is expended to produce heating, so cutting out the electrical middle-man is no bad thing. There is also no reason why you can't distribute hot water via pi
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Has anyone looked into storing solar PV energy by heating a medium and bringing it online outside of peak times for use?
This would make an excellent question for a high school physics test. Any student that cannot easily explain why this is really bad idea would flunk the class.
Heat is the graveyard of energy. It is easy to turn electricity into heat (just run it through a resistor) but difficult to go the other way. The round-trip efficiency of electricity-heat-electricity at molten salt temperatures would be about 30-40%. Almost any other form of energy storage would beat that by a mile.
Re:I believe solar thermal does benefit from scale (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Funny money (Score:5, Interesting)
PV doesn't make sense at any scale.
I've just installed a 2.5 kW Solar system on my house in Western Australia, at a cost of just over $2500. Based on initial readings, output from the unit looks like being between 3,500 to 5,000 kWh/year. My electricity provider charges between 30 and 45c per kWh, and pays 8c per kWh for electricity fed back into the grid.
So my payback time for the initial investment is somwhere between 1 and three years if I consume mostly self-generated power. The panels and inverter I've installed have a 25 year warranty,
How does this not make sense?
And I'm not alone in this, Australia faces an unprecedented oversupply of energy, with no new energy generation needed for 10 years. Coal power stations are sutting down, and even new gas power stations are being mothballed as they are unable to compete.
http://www.aemo.com.au/Reports... [aemo.com.au]
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I think if I was a corporation I would prefer solar and wind, actually.
Nuclear is so burdened by regulation and NIMBY that investments into it are such a crapshoot. Just as you think you might finally get to break ground on a new power plant, some government entity you've never heard of puts an indefinite hold on it.
Solar panels (at least for home use) allow you to stick the home owner and potentially future owners under a binding energy lease, and the government actually pays you (the manufacturer) money t
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Think about it this way. Nuclear supports the status quo - centralized production via corporations. Solar and wind kill the cash cow.
Hardly, and they sure won't kill the "status quo" when FiT programs are paying $0.40-0.85/KwH for electricity from those sources. Welcome to Ontario [financialpost.com], which followed Greece and we are now screaming towards the most expensive electricity in North America thanks to "green power." Even though nearly 70% of our electricity is generated by nuclear, less than 2% is wind or solar.
Oh and I'm sure someone will cry, but you don't have a nuclear generating station near you! Right, I've got one of the largest in the w [wikipedia.org]
Re:Funny money (Score:5, Insightful)
That $400,000 number is suspect. What conditions are what I wonder about.
Don't forget regulation. I can go get some wood pallets behind S-Mart [1], rip them up and make a frame that props a solar panel roughly south, have the wires go to a $10 charge controller, a cast-off battery, and an el cheapo inverter fresh off the Chinese slowboat... and I have a little bit of electric for an outbuilding, for the total cost for well under a C-note, especially if the panel is a cast off or factory second. This isn't a reliable setup, but for a redneck solution to keep a shed lit at night, it is workable.
There is no way in Hell one could ever approach anything nuclear related without billions of dollars in assets. Even a small reactor in the low megawatts will take tens to hundreds of millions of red tape fees, dealing with the anti-nuke lobby and the NIMBY people, then finding a contractor who will actually make a reactor head out of the correct materials and not pot metal, not to mention all the other costs with each step of getting the reactor up and running.
Nuclear power is great scaling up, because it provides the most energy generation for the least amount of real estate. However, it takes no regulation other than basic electrical codes to get solar operational.
[1]: Not Wal-Mart, they want $10 per pallet.
Finally!! (Score:2)
A Think Tank chock full O' Think.
I like it [slashdot.org].
Re:Finally!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Even costing more than other non-fossil-fuel sources, solar appeals because it's something that I can do at home. I can't really do wind, there's probably not enough thermal gradient to do geothermal, there's no stream or river to do hydro, and obviously nuclear is out. That pretty much leaves me with solar.
I'm disappointed that codes for new construction haven't started mandating the installation of solar. Integrated into the design of a house it could probably fit aestetically better than a retrofit, and the cost to purchase such a system when rolled into the 30 year loan would probably make it more feasible for most to have it. On top of that, wider adoption would serve to drive costs down for everyone else, including possible retrofits like mine.
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Use gas e.g. propane for water heating.
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We've put a timer on one of the units, we'll probably put one on the other one some day, once I find a programmable unit that does what I want.
Re:Finally!! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm installing solar this month.
The ROI calculators show a first year 7% ROI (of course, this will increase as electricity prices increase).
It's hard to find another investment which will give me 7% return on my investment and where the return will increase by 3-5% per year for the next 25 years.
This is a no-brainer.
Re:Finally!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Early solar adopters aren't bearing this cost because the power company charges them same amount for power whether or not the sun is shining - it's not really an issue until solar is a bigger power source. Germany IS already there, leading the way with solar and wind, and has been paying outrageous prices for electricity at certain moments when there is a crunch - up to 400 times the normal rate! [bloomberg.com] But as you can imagine this is a huge financial incentive to create new solutions.
I question the study because the transition to solar will be gradual, and it's hard to say what more efficient means we might come up with to store power. If we had a smart grid that could communicate fluctuating electricity prices to devices, there might be a lot they could do.
Re: Finally!! (Score:3)
Because as we all know.. Batteries are free and last forever! Hallelujah.
Sigh.
Re:Finally!! (Score:5, Interesting)
We're looking into Solar right now
I looked into solar last year. In California, we have tiered pricing, where the first tier costs $0.10 per kwhr, the second tier $0.12, and if you go over that, the third tier is $0.30. I wanted to at least eliminate the top tier. But before I invested in solar, I decided to try to cut consumption as much as possible. I added insulation to the attic (saving gas in the winter, and electricity for A/C in the summer), installed an attic fan, and switched all our lighting to LEDs. LEDs are expensive at retail ($10 per bulb) but far cheaper on eBay ($2 per bulb). The result was that I was no longer using any top tier electricity, and the solar no longer made sense. I did all this for about 5% of what the solar would have cost.
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New windows and a 2" layer of insulation on the outside of the house is on the agenda too
I recommend that you put off the solar till after you make the other improvements. Then you can reassess how much power you need. The cost of solar is falling, so there is no rush, unless a tax credit or subsidy is expiring.
The LED bulbs will give you the best ROI. At $2 each, they will pay for themselves in a few months if replacing incandescent bulbs, and within two years if replacing CFL. Unlike CFL, they work fine when cold, so you can replace your porch light, refrigerator light, etc.
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You say 200A, however that isn't actually meaningful without also specifying the voltage. I'm assuming USA 120V, given your dollar-speak, however it would be helpful to make it explicit. There's a 4x difference in power consumption between 200A @ 120V and 200A @ 240V, so what appears to be nit-picking actually makes a massive difference.
Re:Finally!! (Score:5, Informative)
I have to look at both while-running max load and have to consider startup demand. Breakers for individual circuits are supposed to be sized for startup demand (though apparently there's a tiny bit of room for fudge here, with slower-acting breakers so that a peak draw at startup could theoretically exceed a breaker rating for a very short time without either tripping the breaker or being especially dangerous) but by and large, that's what I have to do. I can rule-of-thumb the breakers for the 240V devices to figure out approximate max startup demand if everything kicked on at the same time.
If I add up the startup demand for the three HVAC units, the two hot water heaters, and probably 20A for all of the various residential 120V circuits for lighting and devices, I'm well over the 50A of a solar system, and I expect that with all of that running at the same time I'm probably over 50A there as well. That's the biggest concern, and I know that I've had all three HVAC units running at the same time before. The air compressor doesn't run very often, but it also draws 30A while it does.
We're probably going to put a couple inches of foam insulation on the outside of the house and have it stuccoed, and we're going to change the windows. Unfortunately there are a lot of windows to change, and it'll be close to five figures to change them all.
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Thank you.
+1 informative, +1 helpful, ++? generally spot on :)
Also +1 informative (again) because I didn't know the details of the US distribution grid. I only have experience with our 240V system here in South Africa.
I did know about the 120V centre-tapped system, but we don't use that here [SA], or in Zimbabwe (where I'm from), or in UK (where I lived for a long time.) -- these countries all use 240V.
Good luck with the whole upgrade!
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now that I've had experience with electric power, I wish that our main residential service was more than 120VAC for residential appliances, and that we weren't generally limited to just 240VAC, and then only for bigger things like appliances and tools.
So uh, rewire your house 240. You use all the same wiring, and change just the outlets and [most of the] breakers. Of course, you're going to have to buy all new stuff, except for stuff with external power supplies or the items which support dual input voltage, like most PCs. New tea kettles and waffle irons and so on.
What I'd really like would be three phase
Have you got a lathe the size of a truck that you'd like to be running slightly more efficiently, or...?
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In which universe does (240*200)/(120*200) = 4 ???
Power only varies with the square of voltage for constant resistance, not with constant current.
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So naturally I go price it out. 25-30k+ for most systems.
I assume that this is for solar. A friend who was a building contractor in a former life recently looked at solar and was rather peeved. Seems that the materials are about $5K (US) now and the installation takes a trained group of about 5 to 7 people one day to install. Someone is making a killing on these things.
My friend is now trying to convince local contractors to get into the installation business (most is done by "carpetbaggers") and lower the cost to 10K to 15K. (And the contractor still makes o
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They also make it look like the systems last 80+ years when the reality is they at most last 25 (for solar) which at that point you are looking at full replacement.
Really? "At most"? And why a full replacement? Any argument for that?
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Not going to look for sources, but I've seen resellers say that their panels have 80% performance after 25 years. No idea if they go downhill rapidly after this.
And when you include end-of-life costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Decommissioning costs (including storage, disposal, and demolition) never seem to figure into these numbers.
The authors stated they were looking at the ability of a plant to displace CO2 emissions and using the net benefits to see which is the most cost effective. Wind and solar simply do not have the capacity factors to match hydro/nuke/gas plants and high capacity costs and thus are lees cost effective in reducing CO2. Nuclear decommissioning costs were included in their numbers. In short, solar and wind cost to much per KW to build and generate too little electricity to be cost effective in reducing CO2 emissi
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Shh the eco freaks dislike fission get with the warm fuzzy of does not actually work tech.
Fission works ok now, we have the tech to use more efficient cycles, hell we have the tech to reprocess the fuel rods for existing plants.
Natural gas plants do not reduce GHGs (Score:3)
Or not appreciably so, even compared to coal. That they do so is a myth being promoted for short-term economic gain.
A major problem with natural gas infrastructure is the leakage of methane (unburned) in the extraction and transport process. If that leakage rate reaches 3%, natural gas energy is about equivalent to coal on greenhouse gas effects on the atmosphere.
So increased natural gas energy is not an effective solution for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and slowing the global warming process.
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Decommissioning costs (including storage, disposal, and demolition) never seem to figure into these numbers.
All of which are difficult and expensive due to protests and alarmist by the anti-nuclear crowd.
We could have a very safe waste disposal facility: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y... [wikipedia.org]
If you care about the earth, climate change and CO2 emissions, you need to give up this hippie mother earth nonsense. Wind and Solar do not work yet. Given some time, sure, I'm sure we'll figure something out. But if you want to get off coal, Nuclear is the only option that's ready to go right now.
We should end all production of n
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Decommissioning costs (including storage, disposal, and demolition) never seem to figure into these numbers.
What's the decommissioning costs of a few billion tons of CO2, or of adapting to water level and weather changes?
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Also mercury and other pollutants from burning fossil fuels, what's the decommissioning cost for those?
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Re:And when you include end-of-life costs? (Score:5, Funny)
Video [youtube.com]
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My bigger worry would be shrapnel or debris hitting other units, causing them to then fail. Granted these aren't usually close enough together to make that terribly likely, but I wouldn't think it completely impossible either.
Still far cheaper than the cleanup from Chernobyl #4 or from that plant in Sendai, Jap
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Well, what do you expect? You spend over half a billion dollars on upgrades designed to make the plant run another 20 years, then, a year later you get shut down and told you could be on the hook for hundreds of millions more that simply wouldn't be recouped before the end of life on the reactors.
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Baby boomers have learned pretty well from "the greatest generation" how to put in minimal effort and then concentrate on sucking the system dry. Gen X got away with putting nothing at all in, which means Gen Y will be unable to get anything at all out.
Now, this sentiment is nothing new, and has
in a perfect scenerio, no doubt (Score:2)
Can we factor in the cost of even 1 minor nuclear plant accident and see what the numbers look like then?
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How about we do the same thing with geothermal?
And factor in the costs of even one destructive earthquake?
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If you are seriously comparing the environmental impacts of producing wind turbines and solar panels to the environmental impact of our current scale of fossil fuel extraction and consumption, you need to learn how to think quantitatively, not to mention qualitatively.
This probably ignores cost of decommissioning (Score:2)
I mean, as far as I know, no one has properly, fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and effectively long-term-stored its waste yet, have they? Why shouldn't the cost of doing that, completely and adequately, be built into the cost assumptions for nuclear?
Why shouldn't there have to be an extremely large security bond put up when building one of these things that covers:
a) Full cost of full decommissioning and million-year safe storage
b) Fukushima/Chernobyl scale disaster insurance coverage, covering f
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There's probably also the question of how long before we can get reactors online which make use of the radioactive "waste" we're storing up now?
Considering the material is considered so hazardous, it implies it still has a lot of energy we're not harnessing very well (but could).
Re:This probably ignores cost of decommissioning (Score:4, Informative)
If you read the article and linked information, you'd know they included decommissioning costs, plus costs related to accidents and insurance costs. Also, many nuclear power stations have been fully decommissioned. A surprising number of them are now greenfield sites in the US.
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Except for the nuclear waste which is sitting in pools on site or in casks waiting to be trucked to some future disposal site which in spite of lots of money being spent still don't function.
Re: This probably ignores cost of decommissioning (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, they also factor in fuel disposal costs.
It's on pg. 14 if you're interested.
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Because reprocessing works, there is little reason to store high level waste it's valuable feed stock to our current commercial plants. New designs do not intentionally make a lot of weapons grade byproducts to feed cold war arms races.
Full costs are unlikely accounted for (Score:3)
Decommissioning a nuclear plant site (not counting proper long-term fuel-waste disposal) has estimated costs of $7 Billion per nuclear plant.
My experience with engineering projects tells me that "double it and add 30 (%)" ;=) is a good heuristic for determining how much it will really cost, since everything is usually low-balled to win contracts. So we could guess $15 billion per plant.
No one has really implemented a proper long-term high-grade nuclear waste storage facility yet, so capital and ongoing cost
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The Brookings Institute guy is completely wrong, garbage in/garbage out AKA his inputs were all wrong.
Thoroughly debunked here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/am... [forbes.com]
And Here
http://www.nature.com/climate/... [nature.com]
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Oddly nobody factors in risk and after costs (Score:2)
Ain't it odd? How generally there are two thing always omitted when people try to sell the clean, cheap nuke plants. I also think it's kinda odd that every time something gets discussed terrorism is a big issue (usually as a tool to get privacy concerns out of the way, citing safety and security as the pinnacle of importance), except when we're talking about the one thing that any terrorist with a hint of a brain would aim for: A soft target that not only is invaluable to the power infrastructure but also h
Re:Oddly nobody factors in risk and after costs (Score:5, Informative)
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on 9/11 the terrorists actually flew past indian point nuke plant to get to the trade center
Or... how about the plane that flew right past the Statue of Liberty to attack the second Trade Center tower?
Or... how about the Pentagon plane which executed a complex maneuver to hit the segment of the building that had recently been renovated and reinforced... to better withstand... a plane?
Imagine that -- "They hate our freedom" and yet spared Lady Liberty. This official conspiracy theory is coming apart at the seams. Toto, I get the feeling we are not talking about those terrorists anymore.
How about thermal solar (Score:2)
i wonder what kind of solar technology they are talking about. There are multiple solar technologies so talking about it as a single technology is misleading. Absolutely, non concentrated photovoltaics is the worst technology, the most ineffecient, and the fact the public has been conditioned to think of this as the only solar technology is partly to blame for solar not being more widely used. I wonder how technologies such as mirror or lens concentrated PV, or a thermal concentrated solar technology, or th
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It's important also to consider development area required for solar deployments. A key advantage of rooftop solar (which I think means flat panels and water heating) is that the area is already developed.
You see those maps of the world [landartgenerator.org] with filled in areas representing the solar deployments necessary to power everything, but not often are those areas compared to that of (already developed) rooftops
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They're missing a lot of emissions (Score:2)
I notice that only gas is listed as adding new emissions. But hydro has methane emissions from the vegetation that's flooded when the dam is constructed. Not to mention the concrete that makes the dam. Solar, wind, and nuclear also have some building emissions costs, unless you replace all construction vehicles with electric and find a way to make concrete and steel without carbon emissions. (Wood might be an alternative [popsci.com] for certain parts of wind turbines and maybe even solar frameworks.) Gas should pr
Did they include the NIMBY tax? (Score:2)
Nuclear costs mostly depend on the amount of (not necessarily useful) regulation, and the amount of opposition to building new power plants. If we replaced all the NIMBY Americans with Frenchmen, the costs for nuclear would be much lower than they are now in the US. Wind, solar, and nuclear all have their plusses and minuses, and currently solar and wind are growing while nuclear is stagnating, so you also have to consider what the costs will be in the future.
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> so you also have to consider what the costs will be in the future.
The 9000 kilo gorilla in the corner with nuclear is waste disposal. The assumptions you make there largely drive nuclear economics.
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Waste disposal problems are just a special case of the NIMBY tax. We could just toss it all into a big, dry hole in the ground. As I understand it, we'd come out ahead over coal in terms of health even if we ground up all the waste and tossed it into the atmosphere, or the ocean. The problem really is that people don't understand the cancer risks of living near a coal plant, whereas nuclear energy is OMG NUCLEAR!!!!, so they're trying to compare to perfection instead of as an improvement over what we alread
France can't build nuclear (Score:2)
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The French nuclear industry does not have the very best reputation for diligence and safety. I would not be too surprised if they have a major accident some day. That is the flip side of having no NIMBYs.
Where were all the NIMBYs when they were building the coal plants though? Sure, we eventually got them to fix acid rain, but now we can't safely eat fish (from 70% of the Earth's surface) because of all the mercury from coal, and we still have the CO2 which will have its own costs. Turns out that continuous, ongoing disasters like coal get little notice compared to the comparatively minor nuclear disasters.
Make coal plants clean the mercury out of the ocean, fix the damage caused by acid rain, put the CO2 b
How about falling costs? (Score:2)
The per-kilowatt cost of solar has been on a steady decline for years, and so far the trend shows no signs of slowing. Large scale solar deployments in the future will have the benefit of further lowered costs.
See chart [nytimes.com].
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Cost of nuclear decommissioning? (Score:4, Interesting)
This paper: assumes $0.2 - $0.3 billion to decommission a nuclear power plant (based on a 2013 report by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission)
UK: $9 billion decommissioning costs per plant, based on an estimate by the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.
Japan: $1 billion per plant so far, but estimated $1.8 billion per plant for the remainder
I suspect this paper gets its results by downplaying by an order of magnitude the decommissioning costs of nuclear power.
Outdated number gets it backwards (Score:3)
This has been debunked already (Score:3, Informative)
The Brookings Institution? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Brookings Institution??? Why would anyone give a damn what some think tank, er, thinks?
By definition, a think tank's job is to simply rationalize their clients opinion.
Get the facts straight (Score:3, Insightful)
Quite odd how, out of the first eighteen comments (not counting replies), five are about decommissioning costs, and five are about meltdowns? They seem to repeat the same talking points, almost as if on a script.
I'm not saying they're shills, but at the very least a lot of people seem to be getting their information from the same place, which leaves them missing several crucial facts:
1) Nuclear power works at scale. It's proven, and it scales perfectly. The biggest solar plants on the planet are 500MW (Topaz Solar Farm, PV) or 400MW (Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, thermal). A single nuclear reactor is well above that - scroll down this list [wikipedia.org] and you'll see very few sub-500MW, and quite a few 1GW+ reactors. And remember, most plants have more than one reactor. 66 nuclear plants are enough to give us 20% of our energy. 947 wind plants are only enough to give us 3%, and 553 solar plants (PV and thermal) don't even break half a percent.
2) Nuclear power would be a hell of a lot safer if new designs were actually approved. The regulations are pretty much ridiculous - they don't approve new reactor types that are designed to solve all the problems we've found with the old designs, but they still allow old designs with known weaknesses to be extended long past their designed lifespan. Add to that the ridiculous costs of dealing with the bureaucracy and the weak requirements for cleanup/decommissioning, and it almost seems like the regulations are designed both to make nuclear power unprofitable, and to keep public opinion against it. Hmm...
3) Nobody is arguing for pure nuclear power, because that doesn't work for all the reasons people say it doesn't work. Nuclear (and geothermal, where possible) makes for an excellent base load. Nuclear meshes well with hydro - excess capacity can be used to run the dam in reverse, pumping water up to store that energy for later use. And if positioned right, it provides both cooling water for the reactor, and a single point to close off flow or install filters if something does go wrong. Wind, tidal and solar can supplement this as locations allow, with solar in particular taking the edge off the peak load.
4) Every power plant can go wrong. What happens when a hydro dam fails? Thousands of people die [wikipedia.org]. What happens when a solar plant fails? We don't know yet, but it probably won't be that good considering how much damage they can do even when working properly. Same for wind, and tidal, and geothermal. They do some minor damage even when working perfectly - frying or chopping up migratory birds or fish, or altering the geology in the case of geothermal. Nuclear has the benefit, at least, of being perfectly clean when working perfectly. Yes, if things go wrong it can be absolutely horrible, but that's why regulations need to focus on redundant containment and fail-safe designs, not on constant inspections.
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Bullshit, Brookings institute can't count. (Score:3)
They obviously left several stages out of their calculations.
From Nature.com [nature.com]
Externalization (Score:4, Informative)
Talk about a skewed, worthless study from Brookings. Garbage in, garbage out.
As Amory Lovins ably pointed out, its data is old. It also does not consider the entire cost of production, usage and cleanup. Cleanup costs count too! Are West Virginia, Ohio, British Columbia, Alberta, the Niger River basin, or Ecuador's rainforests, or the Gulf of Mexico just not in Charles Frank's back yard? I guess not. Screw people for living there, then. Do not the geopolitical considerations of an aggressive military foreign policy required to keep the oil flowing not count too? Screw those GIs and the people who live where they're sent in oil wars, too. Exxon's got to make a buck.
That's what externalization is. It means omitting key and pertinent parts of the picture and just sticking it to whomever is dealing with the consequences.
Solar panels are rapidly getting more efficient and cheaper to make, and you can put them directly on site where they're needed so you don't have to lose electricity to resistance across a far-flung grid with its necessary redundancies and overproduction, which are required in the event that a powerstation needs a maintenance cycle.
Someone's just keen to keep a bloody monopoly.
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1990s (Score:3)
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Call me when you can actually get 4-5 BILLION megawatt-hours a year out of Wind and Solar in a stable manner 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Oh. And I will NOT be holding my breath waiting for you.
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So, you're saying we should use non-renewable, polluting alternatives just so it's a better match with wind and solar?
Seriously?
SERIOUSLY?
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Natural gas leads to renewble methane (Score:3)
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The problem is, your "assuming" is a pure fantasy.
You cannot generate 100% of your power with wind/hydro/geothermal/solar.
Wind is out because the wind doesn't always blow or blow in the proper direction or blow at the proper speed ratings for a wind farm to take advantage of.
Solar is out because the sun isn't always shining overhead. Not to mention it's affected by weather/climate conditions as well (panels buried under a foot of snow don't function well, if at all).
Hydro is out because we're already tappe
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only until efficient power storage is solved.
Which would ALSO factor into the costs associated with these power generation technologies.
all those methods will generate more power than needed
You hope.
at certain times of the day so if the excess is stored, problem solved.
Until the systems are actually, you know, INVENTED, TESTED and INSTALLED, no, the problem is NOT solved.
And until then, anyone talking about Wind and Solar are actually talking about Wind-Plus-Natural Gas and Solar-Plus-Natural Gas.
Oh yes. And the byproducts of natural gas consumption? CO2 and Water Vapor (greenhouse gasses anyone?)
So, please, keep hyping your pie in the sky as a fait accompli.
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Re:Not convinced. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Using old data (Score:4, Informative)