Another thread for lengthy debates, off-topic exchanges, long posts on regular hobby-horses etc.
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Another thread for lengthy debates, off-topic exchanges, long posts on regular hobby-horses etc.
John Quiggin 
@quokka
Quokka – I totally agree that financial markets have been atrcious at quantifying risk. When it comes to nuclear both financial markets and economists who purport to be able to measure risks associated with nuclear use have two aims
1. to deny it
2. to avoid paying for the real risks
To do so (pay for it fully) makes it uneconomic, so in order to make it economic pro nukers and economists concentrate soley on the short term, deny longer term risks and thus leave them out their costings entirely. There are no costings of long term risk. There is a focus on human complaince which is utterly ridiculous when it comes to nuclear substances and the infrastructure that houses them. They are best left buried undergorund and not even mined.
@BilB
Yes but since the probability is tiny in all cases, that’s not a serious objection. In practice of course it’s not merely the possibility of a failure that is the issue (uncertainty) but what the impact of that is on others. If a failure occurs but is contained to a narrow area of the plant then the cost to the public is trifling.
One also has to consider the comparative possibility of other plants failing, and since you support them, gas plants and hydro plants can also fail, and when one of these fails, the results can be devastating as we have seen recently.
Do we want molten salt escaping from its confines? I don’t think so. And if we reduce power production to intermittents doesn’t a new certainty of human misery on a mass scale arise?
We humans trade in uncertainty, risk and reward. We always have. Getting all focused on one line item in one option is irrational. The numbers matter.
@Fran Barlow
says “If a failure occurs but is contained to a narrow area of the plant then the cost to the public is trifling”.
And if it isnt confined and escapes like Chernobyl the costs are simply not able to be counted, even now, they are so high.
Fran you also say ” Getting all focused on one line item in one option is irrational. The numbers matter.”
The numbers matter far more when they dont count the risk properly (and dont price it in) but I totally agree that getting focussed on one line item is irrational – being focussed on one intensely dangerous source material and expecting it to solve all energy problems is also irrational.
@quokka
Risk 2:
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=20196
Risk 3:
Development costs of nuke go up, development costs of renewables goes down as demonstrated previously on this thread.
The only way to avoid these risks is to place all current nuclear reactors under public control and charge a nuclear waste per kg price equal to the cost of launching a kg into space.
Today’s nucoholics are passing-off the current costs of today’s nuclear power onto future generations.
If you think the risks of:
1) capitalists misrepresenting costs, and then hitting future society with a double whammy; one for nuclear plants costs, and another for previous waste and current waste storage
2) locking our systems into the most expensive, cost increasing option
can be quantified, then I’d like to see how.
@quokka
With due respect, quokka, your post @48, page 4 is a mess.
Firstly, you quote me from a post not addressed to you, giving the impression that there was a prior exchange of messages between you and me. There was none. You quote from my message to John Morgan.
Second, you copy the error in the spelling of my name for which Peter Lang apologised.
Would you please sort out your memory before you write.
@Fran Barlow
As I said before, if this were true then nuclear power stations would normally have some industry like Aluminium smelting set up next to it to make sure the nuclear plant is used 100% all the time. You failed to acknowledge that your examples were false.
I wouldn’t say hardly anyone.
Yes, a type of “two wrongs make a right” argument.
The Victorian Government managed to get a desalination plant of massive cost started without much scrutiny. It’s going to be far more difficult for the Federal Government to set up something that’s not only of similar type of capital cost but also won’t have bunnies like Melbourne water users paying for the ongoing cost. The cost will have to come out of the Federal budget year-in, year-out for as long as it lasts. Good luck getting that to happen.
@Chris O’Neill
As I said, in Russia this is happening. I’m not sure aluminium is ideal though because some phases of smelting would be time critical. Pumping water sounds a lot less so.
Re: Afghanistan (Nobody who can possibly form government)
More accurately, illustrative of the political reality lying behind the sloganeering.
Fran,
Yes failure is a risk in all technologies. We’ve had 2 gas explosions in Australia in recent years.
Of all the technologies nuclear has the highest possibility of contaminating large areas quickly and for a long periods of time. The risk of failure dramatically increases when new designs and technologies are used for the first time, and this throws the whole negligible risk arguement out the window. One day you are saying tried and true design to support a safety
position, the next you are talking about pushing the envelope with genIV nuclear technology to support a low fuel consumption position. As you move your arguement around the safety probability factor varies by orders of magnitude.
And
“We humans trade in uncertainty, risk and reward”
not where nuclear radiation is involved. Listen to the stories of those soldiers who stood there exposed to the nuclear blasts at Maralinga on how they feel about trading in uncertainty and risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nuclear_tests_at_Maralinga
(the dual post is because my keyboard has amind of its own).
@Chris Warren
Your link reports an estimate of the cost of Yucca Mtn as $96.2 billion over 150 years. Thats $641 million per year. There are about 100 NPPs in the US, which sets the yearly cost per NPP in the current fleet at about $6.4 million per NPP per year. You are not making much of a case for the high cost of storage of nuclear waste. It is an absolute pittance, and sounds like an astonishingly good investment in CO2 emission avoidance. It is a very long way from an insufferable financial burden on future generations whom we may reasonably assume will have superior engineering capabilities to today.
That is as it may or may not be. Time will tell. The IEA in it’s 2010 report on the projected costs of electricity generation suggests that if anything nuclear is cheaper than wind and with a $30 per tonne carbon price is cheaper than fossil fuels and markedly so in Asia. And that includes costs of decommissioning and waste disposal in the case of nuclear plants.
I wouldn’t object to NPPs being under public control, but words escape me at the idea of launching nuclear waste into space.
The thing that future generations will really hate us for will be catastrophic climate change. The cost of that will be many orders of magnitude greater than any possible cost of safely disposing of or storing nuclear waste …. from your own reference above.
@Ernestine Gross
Sorry for misspelling your name. My post may or may not be a mess, but I am not the one suggesting that modern portfolio theory is pertinent to running an electricity grid (if that is what you are suggesting).
I am not aware that dialogue on a forum like this is by formal rule, convention or etiquette limited to bilateral exchanges.
@Fran Barlow
Why don’t you pay attention? I pointed out:
And you’re still doing that. I pointed out that in the case of Kola-1, the load factor last year was 63.26%. The nuclear plant is NOT used 100% all the time.
Amazing what language means these days.
At least you’ve reached the conclusion that it requires political justification implying that there is no cost justification.
@quokka
So you quantify risks with subjective concepts like:
– absolute pittance
– astonishingly good
This is not quantifying risks at all. It is propaganda. And when nukoholics estimate costs they always underestimate the costs and reveal the true costs after development has proceeded – as shown by my references.
The Yucca Mountain and other links were pointing to this risk of post implementation costs increases, not the argued cost of Yucca Mtn.
So if your topic is “risk”, the try to address your own topic.
If your topic is “cost”, then you have misunderstood the 150 year timeline. The storage at Yucca Mountain runs out in 2014 – see
Source: More Yuccas
So we need a new Yucca in 2014, but with increased nukes we will need two of them. These will possibly accept waste until 2025 or thereabouts, when we will need, 4 more Yuccas, which may take humanity to 2035, when, if population and energy use trends continue, we will need 8 more Yuccas.
But when we are building 8 more Yuccas we also have to maintain the previous 7.
If each Yucca costs 50 billion (over however many years), developmental and capital costs, then the cost has blown out to half a trillion by 2035.
If you want to assess the risks over 150 years you cannot just use the one Yucca which runs out very soon, you have to add in all the new Yucca’s which also cost 50 billion over a number of years.
So what sort of wasteland are we leaving for our grandchildren.
I am very suprised at your attempted denial that nuke developmental costs go up while renewables go down.
You say “That is as it may or may not be. Time will tell.”
But we already know this from the paper cited by Peter Lang at:
Comment 30
And as posted earlier – the ANU has published additional work on reducing the costs of renewables.
So in essence, the argument is over. Only politics can be used to force nuclear power onto society – hence the denial and propaganda seen in this thread.
In the long run, waste can only be disposed of in space, and when this technology develops, more suitable circumstances for nuclear power will arise.
@Chris O’Neill
That scarcely disproves the claim of course. Presumably, they’d like to be approaching 100% but for reasons that may have nothing to do with power cost, they aren’t supplying.
You assert that somewhat more than “hardly anyone” raises the cost of the Afghan War. “Hardly anyone” isn’t a precise number of course, but I wonder how many independent relatively contemporary citations in public space about the pernicious effect on public policy of the cost to the Australian public of the Afghan intervention you can actually find. I doubt you will find more than a handful. (Hint: don’t give the precise links becuase they will attract the spamtrap, just give me salient text strings, names so I can find them)
Very few if any will be near the top of the political food chain.
Chris quoted me as follows:
Then continued:
Not at all. IMO, for principled people, public utility and feasibility must be the sine qua non of what we propose. One would be naive however to suppose that rational public policy was either a sufficient or even a necessary condition for public policy development. What is decvisive is the success of public policy advocates in assembling and maintaining the support of decisive stakeholder coalitions and by implication, in frustrating the attempts of those supporting rival policy in doing the same thing.
We have seen over the last decade how persistently this truism has proved to be the case, both locally and internationally, on asylum seekers, war policy, health policy (especially in the US), climate change mitigation, the mining tax and one strongly now suspects, water policy.
Given your comments above, I’m not sure what side of politics you are on, but speaking as a leftist, I’d say we need to be a lot sharper about ensuring that rational public policy also wedges the right and disrupts their ability to present coherent (albeit ignorant and specious) narratives of plebeian empowerment and to mobilise people to vote against their interests.
While cutting allocations sharply is essential, it’s neither enough in policy terms nor politically feasible. In practice, we are likely to get something analogous to the CPRS — once again getting beaten about the head by something that was unfinished business from the Howard era. Don’t get me wrong: I like seeing environmental vandals put out of business as much as the next person, but we have to have an eye to sperating the free riders from those who will simply be caught in the crossfire if we are to get a sound solution.
@Fran Barlow
So is this what all the artificial fuss is all about.
Nuclear lobbyists waging a spoiling campaign against progressives that disrupts their ability to present coherent narratives of plebeian empowerment and mobilise people to vote against commercial nuclear interests.
That would make sense. wouldn’t it?
@Chris Warren
Quite the opposite. It’s leftists waging a campaign to wedge rightwing constituencies against each other by pitting agribusiness and other free riders against smaller landholders over water rights and holding them to their own neoliberal shibboleths (let water be paid for at its true value).
Likewise, it wedges them because as farming in marginal areas retreats and people are given different work to do, (being land stewards for example), the appeal of the leadership of big agribusiness declines. Likewise, once they are out of debt to banks, then the scare campaigns over interest rates decline. Once they aren’t trying to export crops, the push for exchnage rate controls and protectionism abates.
Right now the right is trading on rightwing rural and urban fringe populism for its voting footsdoldiers while at the same time presenting itself as the custodians of neoliberal rectitude. They aren’t entitled to have both constituencies. We must force them to choose.
As to the broader question of nuclear power if the left got behind it, this too would wedge the right. It would strike hard at coal and to a lesser extent gas which stakeholders are the principal opponents of serious action on climate change. Again, the right should not have both coal and nuclear. It should be forced to choose. If we could show that via the state and a CO2 price, a solution to both Australia’s energy and water problems could be effected, and save iconic parts of Australia, then much of the force of the right’s populist posturing would be sapped. This also subverts areguments over population sice these are in large parts built on arguments about the scarcity of water and energy.
So again, the argument for nuclear power ought to advantage the left and sap the right. The trouble is of course, for historical reasons, the left in this country went the other way.
@Fran Barlow
So why, pray tell, did you put up examples that were supposed to prove your point but failed abysmally. If your argument had any credibility whatsoever then your examples would not have failed. The fact that they did shows that your argument has no credibility.
No. Just pointing out that “hardly anyone” apparently means anyone who has no chance of becoming the government.
Right, and for unprincipled people, which is what your conclusion pertains to, political justification is the most important thing.
Good luck trying to pass off nuclear-powered desalination and pumping as “rational” public policy. You’ll need it.
Ernestine Gross, you asked:
“Let me ask you a question: How do you calculate the ‘cost of capital’ for any energy source useful for consumption, either directly by people or indirectly via produced commodities?”
Could you please elaborate on your question. I am not sure if you are asking about, for example debt, equity, discount rates, tax, weighted average cost of capital, externailites.
The ACIL Tasman report to AEMO gives estimated comparitive capital costs for new electricity generators in the National Energy Market.
Click to access 419-0035.pdf
It explains how the calculations are done and includes the figures in tables tables. Does this answer your question?
If not, perhaps the ExternE NEEDS reports will. Google “ExternE Needs” then select one of the reports such as nuclar or solar thermal. Many other organisations such as EPRI, MIT, EIA, DOE, OECD/NEA explain this better than I could. Does this answer your question?
Ernestine Gross,
I noticed your reply to a comment by John Morgan where you said:
“It is an empirical fact that there is ‘residual risk’ with nuclear power. (I’ve listed publications, including from France, a long time ago.) It is also an empirical fact that there is a small probability risk of a large negative environmental and health and safety impact associated with nuclear power (Chernobyl to name one). Your grid design approach does not deal with this. That is to say, your goal (electricity grid design) is merely constraint in the overall description of the problem in a model of an economy that is non-dictatorial.”
I feel this statement is revealing. I interpret this to mean you, like most people, are being influenced by what I believe is an irrational fear of nuclear. I suspect this “irrational fear” biases many analyses. I believe nuclear is safer than fossil fuels, and most renewables and does far less damage to the environment than all. That is even the case when there are industrial accidents like Chernobyl. I believe, if we look at the consequences of Chernobyl, the worst ever and only major accident in the nuclear fuel chain, the actual health and environmental consequences are much less than from fossil fuel plants operating normally. And much less than the consequences of normal operation of many of our industries, especially chemical industries, which we accept as standard practice. We accept the level of risk and the consequences when things go wrong in these industries. We accept them, on balance, because we feel the benefits outweigh the consequences when they go wrong. I believe that radioactive contamination is far less of a problem than chemical contamination. Therefore, I feel we should drop the opposition to nuclear about safety and environmental issues. In these ways, I believe nuclear is a clear winner over all other options. The one place where there is room for serious debate is on the cost of nuclear versus fossil fuel generation. And on that, I feel a lot of the cost of nuclear energy is due to our irrational fear about the safety and health risks of it. Nuclear could and should be cheaper than coal generated electricity (in my opinion).
This short article “What is risk? A simple explanation” provides a bit more on what I’ve said above
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/07/04/what-is-risk/
@Chris O’Neill
They didn’t fail. They affirmed that nuclear power was being used to smelt aluminium. An aluminium smelter is investing heavily in a plant for that specific purpose.
In context, it was clear that that was what I had in mind, since by and large the public is
a) necessarily silent on the matter since their voice depends on polls being taken and information about cost being put into the public domain. I’d be surprised if a properly conducted poll would reveal that 1% thought they knew the cost of the war, whereas mopst would have heard of the NBN cost.
b) relevasmnt only in so far as they have a politicval vehicle through which to act, and currently (apart possibly from The Greens) they don’t since policy is bipartisan
I’ll be interested if this comes up in the debate to be had on this issue. I suspect it won’t.
Not at all. Principled people accept that unless one can translate their principles into public policy and make them stick then the principles are moot. The fact that unprincipled things may be more easily translated into public policy doesn’t make them worth doing of course. It simply means that those advancing principled polciies must be able to frame them in ways that make them realistic.
I don’t believe in luck, but as you apparently do, I thank you for it. You may wish for policies that simply aren’t politically or economically feasible and be prepared to accept the ecological costs of that, but I am not.
Nuclear power remains the lowest footprint source we have and it seems perfectly reasonable, given the abundance of power to be had from it and the low footprint to use it to help abate another serious problem we have — a lack of water in the MDB. Within reason, I don’t care what it costs because I put a high value on preserving the river system. The fact that the same system can help us retire fossil hydrocarbon plants and clean the biosphere of other hydrocarbon effluent, contributing immediately to human health, reducing the damage associated with coal harvest and reducing resource depletion, are also fabulous.
It is already clearly rational policy. Whether it can be sold as such on an early enough timeline for people alive today to realise the benefits remains to be seen.
Ernestine G,
It looks like you have been singled out for some specialised “irrational nuclear fear” counselling. I hope that your problem is not too serious and you are better soon. You’re fortunate to have Peter Lang Bnc attending.
BilB
@BilB
If only they could remember Ernestine’s name Bilb.
Oh please – fresh sand before it becomes a compklete nuclear and intelligence wasted waste dump for pro nuclear advocates. We have all been here before.
Peter Lange is only trying to humour me (and others). Its the sandpit after all.
Sorry, I mis-spelled Peter Lang’s name at 24, p 5. It should be “Lang” not ‘Lange’.
@Peter Lang
There is no point you posting until you address the problem represented by
Figs 5.2, 5.5, 5.6 (as cited earlier) which show that the cost of developing renewables goes down and the cost of nuclear goes up.
You have been asked to explain how you deal with these figures and conclusion, particularly as you cited this source.
@Fran Barlow
They did fail. I asked where a nuclear plant is used 100% all the time. You pointed out one that was used at an average of 63.26% last year. It’s becoming clear that numbers are not your forte.
You were talking about things that violate economic principle and the fact that political justification allows violation of economic principle.
You seem to have forgotten that you are the one who is wishing for a policy that simply isn’t economically feasible.
a.k.a. proof by vigorous assertion. You have the same attitude as the Victorian government that foisted a hugely expensive desalination plant onto the water-buying public of Melbourne whether they wanted it or not. This was the Victorian government’s idea of “clearly rational policy”.
@Chris O’Neill
The capacity factor of all US nuclear plants in 2009 was over 90%
http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/nuclear_statistics/usnuclearpowerplants/
The remaining 10% of capacity is downtime for refueling, scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. (PWRs must be shutdown for refueling – a feature that makes them largely useless for producing plutonium for weapons). As you can see they are basically going flat strap, so any argument about being uneconomic because there is not market for their power 24/7 is plain wrong. That would be because they are supplying baseload demand.
The capacity factor of NPPs has been steadily improving over the years.
Sth Korea does even better than the US with their nuclear ulitization.
For those lucky enough to sojorn in Canberra …… Geoscience Australia is holding an Open Day including:
… a range of science presentations throughout the day, including:
10:30am: Australia’s energy future – from fossil fuels to renewables
11:00pm: Geothermal energy in Australia – the what, how, why, where and when
When: Sunday 17 October 2010, 10am-4pm
Where: Cnr Jerrabomberra Avenue and Hindmarsh Drive, Symonston ACT
Cost: Free
Contact: (02) 6249 9111 or education@ga.gov.au
I suppose the sound of those gagging in the back will be our well known nucoholics.
Peter Lang, some examples might help to illustrate your point:
Most of those who advocate renewables, to the exclusion of nuclear power, appear to be at ease with both gas and hydro, yet neither are by any means safer than nuclear power. In the short term gas plant and pipe explosions are comparatively frequent events. In the long term, the effects of CO2 emissions on the atmosphere and consequently the global climate must surely rate as catastrophic if left unabated and thus, ultimately, much more concerning than any localised disaster. Hydro generation is responsible for what was, as far as I am aware, the worst accident in the history of power production. The Banqiao dam disaster killed 26,000 outright, displaced millions and subsequently led to the deaths of around 150,000 more due to starvation and disease.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Compare the above to Chernobyl below:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/index.html
The point here is not to play a game of oneupmanship on the hazards and horrors of these technologies but to recognise there is risk (often substantial risk) involved in the pursuit of any large scale technology. If we wish to exclude one technology (ie nuclear power) based on the small probability of a large, destructive accident, then, as long as we wish to remain coherent, we must exclude all technologies which carry risks of equal or greater weight. Are you prepared to exclude gas and hydro?
Peter Lang,
I’ve read your posts @18 and @19 twice. I do believe you are trying to humour me.
I had the pleasure of listening to a radio interview of Professor Ian Lowe. May I suggest you read his work.
“We’ve no option but to use nuclear power.” — James Lovelock
@Chris O’Neill
Ah, so that was your point. Your standard for success was 100% usage? That’s a silly standard. All this means that the other 37% of capacity was of no value to this aluminium producer regardless of how cheaply they may have been able to acquire the power.
I was noting that political justification trumps economic principle, which is not the same as avowing that this is apt as what I was proposing violated no fundamental economic principle. Governments contract services all the time. If they can contract for water supply from irrigators they can contract for supply from desalinators and pumpers of water.
Yet you produce no figures to warrant this claim. Are there cheaper petalitres of water to be had elsewhere handy to the Darling? You haven’t said. Are there cheaper GWh (in CO2 or other emission per dollar terms) than with nuclear. You don’t say.
You’re the one guilty of trying proof by vigorous assertion.
@Chris Warren
I’m actually quite positive about geothermal, but I will be even more positve when the firtst plant designed to put the first fossil fuel plant out of business is commissioned.
Ernestine Gross,
I was not trying to humour you nor trying to be smart. I genuinely do not understand your question you asked me.
Could you outline how you would answer your won question, then I could understand what you are getting at.
Did you look at the links I included in #18 and #19? Do you disagree with them? If so why and what in particular.
@Peter Lang
Id read Ernestine carefully if I were you – she doesnt tolerate fools easily.
@Peter Lang
Your links Peter Lamg are all to Professor Brooks “brave new climate” website which is like some sort of naive flag waving banner – Do you actually have anyone else supporting your view except the much beloved pro nuclear website building fundraising hand waving Professor Brooks and his avid disciples (aka climate / environmental scientist but not a nuclear scientist or a nuclear physicist or a nuclear specialty anything scientist???)
Give me a break.
How about this then Alice, from Climate Spectator: http://www.climatespectator.com.au/news/analysis-windy-uk-energy-policy-costly-risky-0
Nucelar is, of course, over. But there is a lot of money still to be made and I tend to think this will push Australia to go the nuclear route. Or at least to the point where ‘compensation must be paid’. That’s enough for the right people to become sweethearts.
But the substantive point I would make is that the debates about nuclear from the pro crowd are typically couched in econoimc terms which require an ‘all things being equal we are cheaper’. This argument can be countered in a couple of ways at least. Firstly one can challenge the ‘all things being equal’, and many do – over and over again. But more fundamentally one can also say – who cares? I don’t care if nuclear is cheaper, why does cheaper act as the final arbiter of value. Nuclear is profoundly uninteresting in the classic case. It leads to less. Nuclear is boring. It has no generative power, in the way say a neuroscientist or philosopher or artist might value.
@embee
Ok embee – got me with a link that wasnt “bravenewclimate”. Sorry – dont read links that are paywalled or want details that breach my privacy.
@gregh
Ib agree Greg h. Its like Fran in here with her nuclear costings….ending yup cheaper. So what> You know, i know that there are huge blig black holes in nuclear costings – maybe not now but maybe in the future – if a bridge in a country town gets old and shaky – it just falls down – with a bit of luck or bad luck on a few people will end up in the river.
Fran cant cost this event with nuclear. Fran hasnt got a clue what the future holds and its simply a filthy dangerous resource to mankind. Fran cant get anywhere near costing honestly with niclear in any short term, medium or long term sense – so she concentrates on the rosy world view where humans meet their compliance targets and firms meet their maintenance costs and all she does is compare it wil coal on this nice preety rosy world assumption.
Its not real and therefore the numbers are, in a word, pure fantasy.
Lets take that nice little incident in Hungary – just a one of accident and not even a nuclear accident. Chernobly will cause damage for generations as did Horoshima and Nagasaki. What do I care about Frans itsy bitsy nonsense costings? What cdo millions around the world think of nuclear as the saviour to coal?. Not damn much. We are all waiting for some real intelligence to enter the innovation stakes not just the existing miners to make even more profits.
Fran you are doing a better, more elaborate, more intricate, lengthier job of verballing yourself than I could ever dare to compete with.
Pardon spelling mistakes but I have lost my patience after enduring days of pro nuclear petty short term costings copied from Professor Brooks site that are all just misleading because NONE can cost the risks of nuclear (not even Professor Brooks) and none even attempt to cost a “Chernobyl style disaster”.
Ive begged for fresh sand. Im desperate to escape the delusionists here, even the ones posing as “leftists’ trying to sell us nukes!
@quokka
You’re doing a lot better than Fran Barlow who could only come up with examples that contradicted what she was claiming. But as I said earlier we would expect nuclear plants in a system with a variety of generator types to be set up with the nuclear plants run as close to 100% as possible and to have a capacity within the minimum demand of paying customers. The US does it that way because they have a variety of generator types. The Russian examples from Fran did not conform to that presumably because their nuclear capacity is higher than their minimum demand. If they ever set up a nuclear power plant in Australia then I expect it would follow the US model where the nuclear capacity is within the minimum demand of paying customers. Also, nuclear power in Australia will not be set up because it is as cheap as electricity is now, it will be set up because coal-fired electricity will become more expensive than nuclear electricity is now because of a Carbon price. Nuclear electricity will not be cheap, it will just be cheaper than other forms of electricity will become.
@Alice,
Well, I don’t suppose you’ll read it, but here is another link to the same article, no paywall, no private info required.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69D34620101014
And one more quote:
Chris O’Neill, you said
“Also, nuclear power in Australia will not be set up because it is as cheap as electricity is now, it will be set up because coal-fired electricity will become more expensive than nuclear electricity is now because of a Carbon price. Nuclear electricity will not be cheap, it will just be cheaper than other forms of electricity will become.”
I agree with much of this statement (no all), and add the following points.
The cost of electricity from the existing coal power stations in Australia is cheap because they were built when power plants were cheaper and most of the debt has been repaid. So the cost of electricity might be around say $20 to $30/MWh from these plants.
Electricity from new black coal (NSW and Qld) without carbon capture and storage (CCS) would be about $50/MWh.
Electricity from new solar thermal (it would run in day time only and effectively in summer only) would cost about $225/MWh. But that is next to useless.
Wind power with gas back-up would be about 2 to 3 times the cost of nuclear.
Nuclear would be about $80 to $100/MWh if we adopt a USA or EU type regulatory regime.
So, as you say, that would be more expensive than new coal without CCS, but much less than wind or solar thermal.
However, there is another option. The real question that I advocate Australians think about is should we be wanting a US or EU type regulatory regime? I say we should not. I say we should be going for least cost nuclear. The benefits of low cost electricity for society are enormous. Google GapMinder and experiment with charting the UN Human Developments Index stats such as charting life expectancy, fertility, education level achieved, health etc versus electricity consumption per capita. The message is clear. Electricity is good for humanity (and, yes, I do understand correlation does not prove causation). The cheaper electricity is the better for humanity.
So I argue we should be going for the least cost, clean electricity available. I argue we do not need the US or EU type regulatory environment. We know that even the old nuclear plants are 10 to 100 times safer than coal, so it is clear, if we are unemotional about it, we should be replacing coal with nuclear as fast as possible.
The advantages of going for low cost rather than high cost nuclear is that it will displace fossil fuels faster, both in Australia and throughout the world. Cheap electricity will more quickly displace fossil fuels for heating and for land transport (electric vehicles or powered by liquid fuels produced using cheap electricity).
I argue that we should do all in our power to get least cost electricity for everyone on the planet. And that starts with us in the developed world. We should let go of our fear and hatred of nuclear.
@Fran Barlow
You obviously weren’t paying attention when I said:
That’s your standard. You suggested nuclear power is cheap at the margin. If it really is then why can’t the Russians find some use for it?
If you offered irrigators the same for their water as the cost of desalinated and pumped water, they would be beating each other hand-over-fist to get their hands on the money.
A nuclear power station motivated by Carbon pricing is not going to produce cheaper electricity than there is now at any time of the day. I don’t see any proposals for this desalination and pumping now so there is not likely to be any such proposal with electricity at least as expensive as it is now. A Carbon price will make off-peak electricity more expensive than it is now because the operating cost will increase until it reaches the point where a nuclear power station operated at 100% capacity factor with electricity prices available over the day becomes economically viable. This will not decrease electricity prices, it just means the nuclear station can compete at the prices available. So there’s no such thing as off-peak being cheaper than it is now. And no-one is proposing desalination and pumping to replace environmental flow now.
And you’re still ignoring the elephant-in-the-room of the massive desalination plant capital cost.
What a hypocrite.
@gregh
Pardon me but I don’t seek or expect interest or aesthetics out of power supply. What I want is power quality, low cost and low footprint.
@Alice
You know Alice, after reading an enormous cross section of your stuff, I think it’s clear that while you may not know what your politics are, you are a conservative. For you, Australia peaked somewhere in the 1950s. If that moment could have been largely preserved with just a few of the elements of modernity which you accept (rights for women, blacks etc) Australia would be pretty much perfect.
That the most serious kickalong for the world’s current problems was in the 1950s seems not to weigh much upon you at all.
One suspects your hatred of Howard largely reflects the fact that he also appropriates your golden age, minus the social progressivism.
that’s alright Fran – you’re just forgetting that “power quality, low cost and low footprint” comes via a technology, and that technologies carry with them a range of commitments beyond the technological. It’s a common mistake, like saying you just want to get from A to B and then buying a car as if all that cars entail is getting from A to B.
Peter Lang @45
“Electricity from new solar thermal (it would run in day time only and effectively in summer only) would cost about $225/MWh. But that is next to useless”
Completely false statement in so many ways. With massive missunderstands such as this the rest of your arguments are rendered useless.
@BilB
I’d ignore Peter Lang from now on. He has shown complete inability to deal with cost trends between nuclear and renewables, and he has been given every opportunity to clarify.
No-one is saying that renewables will cost less than nuclear on a short-term operational basis, the cost benefit for renewables is in the long-run once all the externalities are included.
This is the problem with nucoholics – their eyes and ears are shut – only their mouth is open.