z wrote:

More hysteria. My God, there is actually waste produced from mining
uranium? Why who would have thought that? I guess strip mining for
coal or planting half of Brazil with sugar cane are environmentally
correct and perfect alternatives though, right?

As for what the MIT professors say, who cares? You can listen to them
for their opinions on the economics of nuclear power. I prefer to
listen to companies that are ready to build NEW nukes in the USA right
now. That's right, NEW ones, not depreciated existing ones. These
companies have money on the line. Talk is cheap.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7921287/

"MSNBC staff and news service reports
Updated: 11:15 a.m. ET May 20, 2005
A nuclear power plant hasn't been built in the United States in two
decades, but that could change in the next few years after a consortium
announced locations in six states as possible sites for a nuclear
renaissance.

Nuclear power consortium NuStart Energy on Thursday named the sites
from which it will later pick two for which to apply for licenses to
build and operate nuclear power plants."



Of course the obstructionists will do everything then can to block it,
using junk science and hysteria. And at the same time they will
continue to tell us that hydrogen is an example of a good clean
alternative, when in fact, the truth is, it has to be produced from
some other energy source. But they never bother to tell anyone that,
as if it comes out of a magic outlet at the pump. What a crock!











wrote:

Yeah, right, nuclear is so damn expensive compared to other
alternatives. That must be why all the power companies in the US that
have one are desperatley trying to get their licenses extended so they
can keep them running. And why there are currently proposals to
finally build a few more. It's because power companies want to find
ways to generate power that aren't cost effective.

"Worldwide,the majority of current nuclear power plants are competitive
on a marginal generating cost basis in a deregulated market environment
because of low operating costs and the fact that many are already fully
depreciated. ...
"However,new nuclear power at generating costs between 3.9 and 8.0
c/kWh ...
"pebble bed modular reactor ... expected cost of power would be
approximately 2 c/kWh including the full fuel cycle and decommissioning
(Nicholls, 1998). These costs are far less than typical present nuclear
technologies and in part perhaps the result of engineering optimism.
Other assessments quote double this generating cost (WEA, 2000). ...
"In high-wind areas, wind power is competitive with other forms of
electricity generation at between 3 and 5 c/kWh. The global average
price is expected to drop to 2.7-3 c/kWh by around 2020 due to
economies of scale from mass production and improved turbine designs.
... However, on poorer sites of around 5 m/s mean annual wind speed,
the generating costs would remain high at around 10-12 c/kWh ...
"Biomass fuels ... high-pressure, direct gasification combined-cycle
plant ... by 2020, with operating costs, including fuel supply,
declining from 3.98 to 3.12 c/kWh (EPRI/DOE, 1997). By way of
comparison, the higher current operating costs of 5.50 c/kWh for
traditional combustion boiler/steam turbine technology, (reflecting
poorer fuel conversion efficiency compared with gasification), were
predicted to lower to 3.87 c/kWh. ...
"The cost of PV [photovoltaics] ... is slowly falling due to
manufacturing scale-up and mass production techniques as more capacity
is installed. Generating costs are relatively high at 20-40 c/kWh.
However, PV is often deployed at the point of electricity use such as
buildings, and this can offset the high costs by giving a competitive
advantage over power transmitted long distances from central power
stations with high losses and distribution costs."
"Carbon emission and mitigation cost comparisons between fossil fuel,
nuclear and renewable energy resources for electricity generation";
Ralph E.H. Sims, Hans-Holger Rogner, Ken Gregory; Energy Policy 31
(2003) 1315-1326
http://www.iaea.org/OurWork/ST/NE/Pess/assets/Energy%20Policy%202003.pdf

Nuke, wind, or biomass, it's not going to be cheaper than 4 cents per
kwh. Note that this is just the generating cost; any difference is
going to be even less percentagewise when you tack on the distribution
and administrative costs, which is why you're not paying your electric
bill at 4 cents per kwh now.

As for your cost effective nuclear plants that the power companies are
lining up to produce:

"REAL LEVELIZED COST Cents/kWe-hr
Nuclear (LWR) 6.7
+ Reduce construction cost 25% 5.5
+ Reduce construction time 5 to 4 years 5.3
+ Further reduce O&M to 13 mills/kWe-hr 5.1
+ Reduce cost of capital to gas/coal 4.2
Pulverized Coal 4.2
CCGTa (low gas prices, $3.77/MCF) 3.8
CCGT (moderate gas prices, $4.42/MCF) 4.1
CCGT (high gas prices, $6.72/MCF) 5.6
"The actions will be effective in stimulating additional investments in
nuclear generating capacity only if the industry can live up to its own
expectations of being able to reduce considerably overnight capital
costs for new plants far below historical experience.
"We propose a production tax credit of up to $200 per kilowatt hour
(kWh) of the construction cost."
http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/pdf/nuclearpower-full.pdf
But what do John Deutch and Ernest Moniz and all those MIT wackos know
about engineering costs? You've informed us that we aren't subsidizing
nuclear plants at all, they pay for themselves the same way we pay for
garbage hauling and that ought to be good enough for them. The fact
that both Sims et al and Deutch et al refer to overoptimistic
unrealistic cost expectations by the industry shouldn't bother anyone.

Never mind high level radioactive waste; in fact, the industry doesn't
even deal with the debris left over from mining the uranium. Add these
costs to your balance sheet:
The highest grade uranium ore contains less than 1% uranium, often less
than .2%. So huge amounts of ore are pulverized, leaving 99.9% of it as
tailings full of heavy metals and containing 85% of the original
radioactivity, which eventually ends up downstream or in ground water.
The largest such piles in the US and Canada contain up to 30 million
tons of solid material. In Saxony, Germany the Helmsdorf pile near
Zwickau contains 50 million tonnes, and in Thuringia the Culmitzsch
pile near Seelingstädt 86 million tonnes. Luckily, after about a
million years the radioactivity finally will have died out. The EPA
estimates the lifetime lung cancer risk from living near a pile of
uranium tailings as 2%, just from the radon it emits. (This is about
1/10 that of a heavy smoker, and more than a lifelong heavy smoker who
has quit for 10 years). This means that the uranium tailings deposits
already existing in the United States in 1983 will cause 500 lung
cancer deaths per century. Aside from gradual dispersal of tailings by
everything from leaching into groundwater to burrowing animals, every
now and then the dams they are held behind break; 1977, Grants, New
Mexico, USA: spill of 50,000 tons of sludge and several million liters
of contaminated water; 1979, Church Rock, New Mexico, USA: spill of
more than 1000 tons of sludge and about 400 million liters of
contaminated water; 1984, Key Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada: spill of more
than 100 million liters of contaminated liquids. And of course, in the
third world tailings have a tendency to just get dumped. At Bukhovo in
Bulgaria, the tailings were just dumped between 1947 and 1958,
eventually discovered to have contaminated 120 hectares of land which
was being used for agriculture. After some cleanup, they are still
being used for agriculture, even though creeal grains grown there now
contain radium up to 1077 Bq/kg. At Mounana in Gabon, more than 2
million tonnes of uranium mill tailings were dumped into a creek
between 1961 and 1975.