“But, nuclear plants are expensive to build and their radioactive by-products constitute both a security and health risk. Storage of spent fuel from reactors is a continuing source of controversy and conflict.”
1. It’s not expense as much as the distribution of costs: nuclear power plants are heavy initial investments with almost no fuel costs. The overall cost is very low, but a rate structure that allows utilities to pass on fuel costs and does not allow them to pass on initial investments (Surprise!) discourages initial investment, even if the overall cost of the plant with a heavy initial investment is lower. The result of this rate structure is plants that run on natural gas, because natural gas plants are cheap to build. The gas itself is incredibly expensive, but that doesn’t matter to the utility, since it’s passed on to the consumers.
This doesn’t affect only nuclear power–it affects everything that uses less fuel at the cost of a higher initial investment, meaning clean energy sources.
2. People tend to spend quite a lot of time coming up with absurd scenarios for terrorist attacks on and accidents at spent fuel storage locations, even if these ideas have serious practical problems or are even physically impossible to execute, and use them to argue against new build. There are two main problems with this line of reasoning:
-Nuclear power plants have a waste problem because they are socially responsible. Coal-fired plants produce just as much radioactive waste and use the sky as a sewer. Thus, even though they produce ten million times more waste, they don’t have a waste problem–if you don’t count the 30,000 people who die every year in this country inhaling it.
-The “waste” stored at nuclear power plants isn’t really waste. Canadian reactors are more efficient than American ones and can use this “waste” directly as fuel. In fact, 95%-97% of each “waste” fuel rod is still perfectly good fuel.
Filed under Alternatives, Anti-Nuclear Quote of the Day, Economics, Health, Security and Terrorism, Waste
Posted on August 31, 2006 by Stewart Peterson |
Sure it’s expensive to build but it’s cheap to operate.
What many don’t seem to know is that new coal plants (IGCC) will be just as expensive to build. There is probably just as much uncertainty in IGCC as only a handful of plants have been built in the world.
By 2015 the U.S. is going to return to building baseload generation. And what are the options? Coal or nuclear.
Substantial capital will be needed regardless of the source built.
I would think there’s more uncertainty in IGCC–after all, they’re far more complicated than a modern nuclear plant and have no operating record.
Are utilities necessarily going to return to building baseload generators? Renewables don’t work well with generators that can’t load-follow, and the US flares quite a lot of coal gas, not to mention Iran’s gas deposits or offshore drilling. Combine that with future oil shortages, and we could end up with less coal, less nuclear, less hydro, a whole lot more gas (including coal gas), and a little wind, and any surplus coke sold to Fischer-Tropsch facilities. It’s certainly the easy way out–environmental groups would love it and the market is rigged in such a way that that could very well work.
Oh yeah we’re going back to baseload. And it’s perfect timing for nuclear since the need will begin around 2015. Check out EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2006. If you scroll down to Figure 62 you will see coal is projected to increase substantially. If you look at the data available on other pages you will see that coal begins to take off around 2015.
Besides the forecasts, we hear from many companies that they’re going to need a lot of new baseload next decade.