I’m getting tired of comments threads being derailed by disputes over nuclear power. So I’m going to give everyone a final chance to state their views on the question, then declare this topic off-limits. Here are my views:
* If there is no better option, I’d prefer an expansion of nuclear power to continued reliance on fossil fuels (particularly coal) to generate electricity
* We don’t have enough information to determine whether nuclear power is more cost-effective than the alternatives (conservation, renewables, CCS) and we have debated this question at excessive length (a fact which itself reflects our lack of info)
* In practical terms, there is no chance of any movement towards nuclear in Australia for at least the next five years.
So, I’m going to ask everyone to have their final say, and come back in five years when we might have something new and relevant to say.
Update I’ve been asked by Fran Barlow in comments to reconsider my policy, and here is my response. If I see anything new and interesting (to me, that is) on the topic, I’ll post on it, and open up discussion. Readers who see something suitable are welcome to email me and tell me. Otherwise, nothing more on this until further notice, please, including in open threads.
John Quiggin 
Fran,
As a manufacturer I have the ability to test Trieb’s figures. A delegation of local manufacturers, from this area, went to Germany a few years ago and went over the information directly. I don’t blogerise around to get my information. I write to people, meet them personally, and assess information in my capacity as a product designer and manufacturer. I do not take anybodies information as fact with out cross verification, and that does not mean find two blog comments that look similar or suitable.
@BilB
Bilb,
Try reading the papers I referred you to. If you find errors, I’d be pleased to hear of them. If you do find one or more errors, could you please post your comments on the relevant BNC thread. If you post errors here they will inevitably get lost. By the way, if you do think you have found an error you might want to check the other comments on the thread first. I expect it is likely it has already been discussed there.
Fran,
Again your simplistic understanding of the real world shows through with your comment on Chris Warren’s comment. His $1 billion is more correct. The funding cost is only liable in that costing model on the “work in Progress” installations ie where costs not covered by operational returns require financing. Once a renewable facility is operational it overs its own repayments and interest. However in the 20% retail electricity levy model none of that is relevent.
Again I have to believe that you are being deliberately deceptive or extremely naive. Which is it.
@Fran Barlow
As usual I’ll let others check your ping-pong comments.
But 300 billion divided by 15 years is $20 billion each year.
So at 5%, this $20 billion capital injection is 1 billion a year but this would increase over time [was this your point?].
1 billion a year is less than $100 per capita per annum if there are 20 million people.
I suppose you noticed that if you multiply 20 million by $100, you end up with 2 thousand million.
However each year this would compound, so finally after around 10 years, the funding cost would possibly reach $1,000 per capita per year. [Was this your point?]
So $20 a week is all it takes for a sustainable environment. Double this for a safety margin if you like.
But of course – power generations also attracts sales revenue, so I assume this can repay the capital sunk costs.
Can we afford $50 a week? I think so.
So it is all affordable – the only issue is politics.
Perter Lang
I will be reading through the BraveNewClimate information however you might care to do some research yourself over here
http://www.solarpaces.org/inicio.php
@Hal9000
Thank you for this reference. The costing is of interest to me.
Yes, I can verify my figures with direct information. My calculatations, assumptions and sources are published on the BNC web site. If you find errors I’d be please to hear of them. Please check in the commets first to see if they have already been raised and addressed.
You state you can verify your figures. I would like to see how you calculated your figures and your assumptions.
@BilB
Again though you are making no allowance for exposure to debt service volatility associated with relative currency movements and interest rates. Both rates and relative currency can move against you over 20 years.
Hedges are available of course, and they will very probably turn out to be as expensive as if you borrowed the whole lot up front, though one might get lucky.
BilB,
Do you know anything about the solar power station the ACT Government is considering. According to ABARE, it is 22MW and the cost estimate is $140 million. Is any storage included? If so how much? At what rate is the stored energy lost if not used?
JohnL @4, p5, referenced a paper by Dr Martin Cooper, senior fellow for Economic Analysis at the University for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School, in his June 18, 2009 study “The Economics of Nuclear Reactors: Renaissance or Relapse”. This paper contains data on cost over-runs of nuclear power plants, time delays, and some data on the financial market assessment. It ain’t look good for nuclear.
Of course if one goes away from a non-dictatorial society (as approximated by social democracy) then all sorts of things are possible, including Chernobyl.
The outrageous costs are simply the result of unnecessary red tape and government intervention. I remember in the good old days when some Italian guy called Fermi could just stick some enriched uranium in some graphite blocks, stack them up with a few boron rods running through, pull out the rods, and hey presto, fission.
Really, where’s the problem?
Nowadays, not only would you not be allowed to do it that way, and in any old place you desired, but whatever way you were allowed to do it you would be buried under a mountain of paperwork. No wonder there are cost overruns. Who can keep up with the utter pointlessness of these bureaucrats? Safety is vastly overrated in this nanny state.
What the industry really requires to be cost competitive is complete deregulation, or self regulation.
Fermi regulated himself just fine.
Presumably this is a ‘first-of-its-kind’ costing.
What discount should one apply for future replications of the same technology?
Using fossil I expect you could get more than 22MW capacity for $140 million.
,
Peter L,
Any small scale plant has an entirely different costing structure to a major installation. To get the best economy Australia would commit to 6 gigawatt of Solar Paces CM3 style installation which includes extra fields and storage sufficient to deliver name plate capacity 8000 to 9000 hours per year. At this scale the steel production and mirror production is done on site. This optimises economies of scale while minimising offshore production. Fittings may be made in the most cost effective country and the only cost from Germany is design services and certain high technology components. A gigawatt installation is 20 square kilometres of solar field but the CM3 type construction may be larger. There will be 4 off 250 megawatt turbine houses. Building on this scale is an entirely different proposition to building a pilot facility in a non optimal solar location. It si completely irrelevent to take the cost of a 220megawatt plant and multiply that out to 1 gigawatt.
No I do not know anything of the ACT proposal. It may be a hybride with optional storage. The Hybride means that it will burn gas to power the turbines during non solar periods. There is a report on the performance of the eutectic salt energy storage installation in Spain. I would have to did to find it. As I recall the storage paid for itself rapidly and more was to be added as it provided the ability to perform as load balancing thereby selling into the profitable demand periods. I suspect that the heat loss rate is fairly low as the surface area of the exposed parts of the tanks is small relative to the mass of molten salt, recognisning that the bulk of the energy is stored as latent heat.
It is the energy storage capacity of CSP that makes it so attractive apart from being a collector of solar energy.
22 megawatt obviously
@Freelander
o.k. I should have written it ain’t look good for nuclear power for peaceful purposes.
BilB,
Your comments here suggest you are simply a salseman and have little understanding of what you are speaking about. I look forward to the basis of your cost estimate for solar power to provide the NEM’s 2007 demand for a capital cost of $180 billion, with the basis of estimate laid out so I and others can follow it.
You can be peaceful, and carry a big stick. Though if you have a big enough stick you don’t have to be peaceful.
Fermi built the first nuclear pile under the stands at a sports stadium at the University of Chicago, near the centre of Chicago. He was worried the president of the Univeristy wouldn’t give him permission to build the pile so, to avoid complications (you know, bureaucratic red tape, that sort of thing), he didn’t ask him. He was pretty sure, even though it hadn’t been done before, that he had got it about right, and that it wouldn’t blow up. Well he was willing to take the risk.
Where would we be today if pioneers weren’t willing to make these sorts of decisons on our behalf?
@Ernestine Gross
All sorts of things are always possible Ernestine …including Chernobyl and including the monumental oil leak now happening. The less dangerous the material (when all sorts of things do happen and cannot be predicted let alone costed makes me wonder about the people who get bogged down in costing things like nuclear “when all things are presumed to go well”.
Can someone tell me when we first discovered a use for oil…did anyone predict or cost climate change in? Lesson there….costings based on “the sky is always blue” approach are completely useless.
@Fran Barlow
Fran lets not pretend and make up stories
“Shorter Alice/Ernestine/Other …”
As much as I would like to have Ernestine’s level of understanding…I am not Ernestine. I am Alice and we are not sockpuppets of each other and we are not the same person and you have been informed of this before. If you fail to take my – ask JQ about the ISPs. Perhaps you are as belligerant on this “invention” as you are over the facts you have been exposed to here (and ignore) in favour of your pro nuclear “push.”
I cannot help but come to the conclusion, as someone else observed here, you are being wilfully deceptive, rather than simply naive. It has also been observed that you dont stray far from one website when it comes to research you quote. Hardly evidence of wide unbiased readings…but then the public domain, lately, has produced some incredibly biased “anti- science” purporting to be “science” hasnt it?
In an ideal world science is not wilfully or deliberately biased Fran.
Peter Lang 17,
You will have to explain what you mean by
“to provide the NEM’s 2007 demand “
Alice,
I wonder if you spend as much time campaining against such things as methyl isocyanate (MIC) as nuclear? This was the compound which was responsible for the death’s of the Bhopal disaster – an industrial accident which killed many, many times more people than Chernobyl. This compound is still commonly used in pesticides, and there is very likely a manufacturing facility using MIC in your city, or city nearest to you.
Of course, there are many, many other industrial processes all over the world which are every bit this dangerous, but have no where near as many safety feautures and regulations in place as nuclear fission.
What makes nuclear so special to you that you feel the need to actively campaign against it? Particularly when looked at from a climatic perspective?
Actually, that last post goes out to all “anti-nuclear” people.
@TK
You are off topic. Please read head post of this thread.
@TK
Tk – you didnt bother to ask me…which may have been half way polite at least… but Im as indifferent towards methyl isocyanate as I am to nuclear fission. Im not in favour of “ingredients” of our production that kill people…where do I sign? None of them.
We can grow stuff and feed people without the carcinogens and other deadly ingredients.
Neither is special to me – but you didnt notice that obviously… and to claim that one is more special to me is stupid, irresponsible and downright misleading
( maybe to others but not me – a “try on” but rather pathetic as an argument ..suggest go back and have another try at a better argument – not clever).
@TK
TK – I might also add the topic of this post is “nuclear” not your substance …methyb isocyanate as you raised at 22 – Im not sure if you realise you are completely off topuc …but Im sure JQ might start a thread on that if you ask nicely. Id be interested.
I am not off topic at all. John asked people to give their last comments on nuclear power. People have been making references to nuclear safety. I am attempting to add some perspective to the phantom and grossly over-exaggerated nuclear fears.
Alice:
“Im not in favour of “ingredients” of our production that kill people”
Perhaps you should campaign against the use of fire then? After all, that killed 173 people during the horrific bushfires in Victoria last year.
@TK
She might also campaign again solar radiation, which, while useful for all sorts of things, as most know, also causes melanoma.
@TK
Please TK – you are really cltching at straws now….and as for poor Fran – she is so badly outnumbered here…its somewhat sad..the posts at 27 and 28. Ill make no further comment.
Slight difference there, TK, methyl isocyanate along with thousands of other toxic chemicals doesn’t mutate into a dozen other radioactive chemicals or being proposed to be installed at an outer suburb near you, whereever you live.
@”Alice”
It really annoys you that I have blown your cover “Alice”. Your hijinks have been exposed. Not only fo you and “Ernestine” share some distinct patterns of speech but the frequency with which you post in quick succession (fewer than 3 minutes apart) is a complete give away. Above @24, 25 you and “Ernestine” are 1 minute after each other, and not for the first time either.
Bilb, #22, You asked:
“You will have to explain what you mean by ‘to provide the NEM’s 2007 demand'”.
You will understand when you have read this paper: http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/08/16/solar-power-realities-supply-demand-storage-and-costs/
TK, sorry to get all picky but rich countries generally don’t use methyl isocyanate to make carbaryl. And quite possibly poor ones don’t either anymore.
Well, Peter Lang, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble there to make the problem seem a lot more difficult than it is. I think that you need to go back through the posts to find the link to SolarPaces solutions document.
The Europeans, who have been working on renewables especially wind and CSP for many years. SolarPaces address the situation that you are obsessing over with a 3 tiered system structure.
CM1 standard solar field with tubine house
CM2 hybride solar fields with turbine house and gas firing backup baseload capable
CM3 baseload multiple solar fields for day time, night time and other non solar periods turbine house and with gas backup .
There is a 4 fold difference in price from CM1 to CM3.
It is as simple as that. Apply the correctly designed hardware and full name plate continuous output is guaranteed. There are many unmatchable features that CSP offers that no other system does especially nuclear. The most signigficant of which is that CSP being a broad field system cannot totally fail.
There is no point in spelling it out blow by blow. 30 gigawatts of SolarPaces CM3 system delivers 30 gigawatts continuously there is your NEM 2007 fully catered for. Australia already has 6 gigawatts of hydro with pumped storage capability and a rapidly growing wind energy sector, significant biomass capacity, SolarPV and GenII PV systems on the near horizon, all of which would produce significant over capacity with a fixed population.
With a nominal 6 billion dollars per gigawatt for the CM3 system the full replacement will cost approximately 180 billion over 30 years, or 6 billion dollars per year, or 20%
or 20% levy on retail electricty prices.
Achieving what Australia needs to eliminate up to 50% of CO2 emissions is not the massive exercise that it is presented to be.
@Fran Barlow
Tiring Fran…and wrong again, and again, and again…
BilB,
I am familiar with what is going on with research and demonstration into solar power in EU and USA. I am also familiar with how Spain, Germany, Denmark, UK, Ireland have wasted a great deal of money and seriously damanged their economies by providing massive subsidies for renewable energy, all for no gain.
So I hope your post is not an attempt to avoid following through on your undertaking. Are you going to post the basis of estimate of your $180 billion figure so I can expose why it is grossly in error. I realise you don’t have much of an understanding of what you are talking about, so you will need to get help to put this together. Hopefully, in doing so, you and the others involved, will begin to realise what is involved in trying to get intermittent renewables to meet our demand for power.
You and others who are propogating the myth that solar power can meet our needs are grossly misleading the public with simplistic claims. This needs to be exposed. I hope you have the integrity, as a business man, to follow through on your undertaking.
Just to remind you, you stated “I can verify my figures, can you veryify with direct information your claim?” You have read the basis of my estimate. I am now waiting to see yours.
For others who would like to follow the discussion, the papers listed below explain the basis of the figures I posted. As I said, I welcome any errors being pointed out. If there are errors I’ll correct the paper. Please provide criticisms on the relevant BNC thread so I can keep track of the discussion and then correct any errors that are found.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/08/16/solar-power-realities-supply-demand-storage-and-costs/
Ill post the other links in following threads because the system seems to accept only one or two links per comment.
Continued from previous post:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/09/10/solar-realities-and-transmission-costs-addendum/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/01/09/emission-cuts-realities/
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/04/05/pumped-hydro-system-cost/
I’d suggest reading the pdf version of the paper in each case.
@BilB
Another avid fan of the single website source “bravenewclimate”. Id suggest DNFTT.
Why would we want to go with renewable energy (RE) instead of nuclear (NE) energy given:
1. RE is far more expensive than nuclear,
2. Only the fuel is renewable, not the whole plant. And nuclear fuel is a minuscule quantity
3. RE requires some 10 to 15 times as much materials as nuclear. That means 10 to 15 times as much mining, materials handling, mine waste management, materials processing, manufacturing, fabrication, construction, decommissioning, waste disposal and don’t forget the transport of all these products between each step along the way.
4. Nuclear is some 10 to 100 times safer than coal for generating electricity. The passionate, anti-nuclear bloggers blogging on this thread do not seem to understand this.
Do have a look at the second and third figures here: http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/08/13/wind-and-carbon-emissions-peter-lang-responds/
Click on the link above the first paper to go to the source. Click directly on the second figure to go to the source.
for those interested – and really it isn’t that interesting to waste time on nuclear as an intellectual exercise – look at Stephen Gloor’s critiques of peter langs articles. In my view Gloor points out the major flaws quite well.
Peter Lang,
Here is the SolarPaces document,
Click to access Solar_Paces_Paper_Trieb_Final_Colour_corrected.pdf
I was quoting from memory with CM1-3 is actually SM1-4 (SM being solar multiple). The costs are denominated in Euro, however, it is known that such systems when manufactured in the installation country costs are not an exchange value equivalent. ie 6 billion euro translates nearer to 6 billion Australian, or somewhere in between, as labour and materials take advantage of local conditions.
There is another document somewhere which better describes the field layouts.
In principle the SM4 configuration eliminates the output deviations that you build your negative case upon. SM4 delivers your NEM’s 2007 demand profile. It then comes down to what can such a system be built for. I am saying 6 billion dollars per gigawatt. You are sayin 147 billion dollars per gigawatt.
I challenge you to verify your fantastic figure against the information published by the German government. There is an earlier costing formula embedded on page 9 of this document
Click to access cspnow.pdf
, however this formula is based on the previous CSP installation where mirror prices were nearer to 270 euro per square meter due to the small solar field size against the 120 euro per square meter achievable when the field size is of a significant nature.
Gregh,
If you follow through the discussion you will see that Gloors arguments were addressed and dismissed. They had no basis. Gloor was coming from an emotional belief in renewables and could not face up to the facts. Perhaps you are also tackling the issue from am emotional rather than a rational perspective.
I hope you might read the other links I provided which cover solar thermal, transmission and comparison of costs and CO@ emissions foar a mix of technologies phased in over time as coal fired power stations are phased out.
This can be a rational debate or an emotive debate. If you want the latter, I’m not interested.
BilB,
I’ve provided the basis of esdtimate. It is laid out in the papers I’ve given. I am more than happy to get into specifics questions or criticisms about the estimate. However, ther is no point if it is just a matter of trolling nonsense.
You undertook to provide the basis of your estimate. I am waiting. I am very used to people making statements and giving undertakings like you have made and then running away. Let’s see you stand behind your undertaking. You say you are a business man. Let’s see your integrity as you back up this undertaking.
@Peter Lang
“I am familiar with what is going on with research and demonstration into solar power in EU and USA. I am also familiar with how Spain, Germany, Denmark, UK, Ireland have wasted a great deal of money and seriously damanged their economies by providing massive subsidies for renewable energy, all for no gain. ”
Peter Lang, you may have been or still are a very competent engineers or scientist in one field or another. This is for others to judge. However, I am suprised that you seem to be totally unaware or in denial that it is scientists and engineers from Germany, other EU countries and a few from Australia who develop various renewable energy technologies. Further, in these EU countries engineers have a much higher status and income than accountants.
I hope you don’t mind if I am frank by saying you have no idea about Economics because:
1. The single biggest damage to the economies of the countries you refer to has nothing at all to do with energy of any source but has everything to do with the Wall Street investment banks and their cronies, the US rating agencies, who deceived the public in exchanging savings in real Euros for junk bonds marketed as ‘investment grade bonds’. I suppose the GFC has passed you by. Source: General knowledge by now.
If a fraction of these destroyed savings had been spent on faster development of renewable energy then the worst possible outcome would be that some companies in the renewable energy sector would have earned a bit more ‘supernormal profits’ and the best possible outcome would have been that the countries in question could have adherred to their scheduled shutting down of existing nuclear power plants. Source: Public knowledge including election results.
2. A lesser, nevertheless noticable damage to some industries has been the importation of USA style management techniques. In the electronics industry I know of one specific case in detail where human resource (HR) managers and public relations people were introduced. These clowns, for lack of a better descriptive term, organised staff meetings for the purpose of staff getting to know each other (they used to do that over a beer or wine in a pub after work), they introduced some words (can’t remember) which named a day long excercise in the woods. The engineers and technical staff went along shaking their heads about the madness. Then they introduced ‘matrix management’ – resulting in total confusion. The company went broke.
3. Some larger well known companies went onto the merger and takeover bandwaggon, wasting lots of money and some reputation in the process.
4. …….do you want me to go on with details?
5. You fail to understand that in non-dictatorial societies, it is not you or Fran Barlows who is in charge of what people want but it is the people themselves. If the people in a country prefer to pay x% subsidy for renewables instead of y+delta% for nuclear where y G.E. x and delta represents future tax liabilities due to uninsured liability risk, storage risk, decommissioning costs, then it is strictly none of your or Fran Barlow’s business.
@”Ernestine Gross”
What an intriguing view of democratic governance you have, “Ernestine”.
@Peter Lang
nice rhetorical trick to claim people who disagree with you are ’emotive’ but no substance Peter – Gloor made substantive points that were not successfully countered. I could make similar points, others have, but they also would just be ignored or trivialised by you and your fellow propagandists
@Fran Barlow
Can’t you do anything else except playing ping pong games with half quotes. You forgot to mention that your quote comes from a post I wrote in reply to Peter Lang who wrote about specific EU countries. I understand you are not a voter in these countries.
You again demonstrate your ignorance, Fran. All of mainstream economics which deals with non-dictatorial resource allocation corresponds to exactly what I wrote. But, perhaps, the error is on my part to the extent that I seem to remember you having mentioned on a post that you were a Trotzkyite in your younger days.
I
@gregh
It is amazing how the social science-media management crowd lack imagination. For the past 20 years or more they come up with the same old ‘strategy’ involving ’emotional’ and NIMBYism, and trying to keep people busy with false assertions and stupid ping-pong word games. Don’t get me wrong, I am not having a go at all people who come from various social sciences. Some know how to make a living without having to intellectually prostitute themselves and these people contribute greatly to society in many ways that are not captured by monetary variables.