the cost of nuclear energy

[miriam_e]

The Australian government report on the cost of nuclear energy has come in with the verdict that coal is the cheapest power source until you factor in the costs of carbon emissions and then nuclear power becomes the cheapest. How very odd... and how very convenient. Like, none of us expected them to come up with that surprising finding, right? Riiiight. [rolls eyes]

The Queensland government did an investigation into the costs of power generation a couple of years ago. They came up with very different results. (They're ordered in a very telling way -- from the form the politicians love most to the ones politicians dislike most.)

Coal (steam turbine)	3 - 5
Natural gas (CCGT)	4 - 5
Nuclear (USA) (steam turbine)	19 - 25
Large hydro-electric	6 - 10
Small to medium hydro-electric	4 - 12
Wind	6 - 17
Solar thermal	18 - 25
Solar photovoltaic	30 - 50

I'm sure the government hasn't heard of the Internet Archive that can be used to undo orwellian rewriting of information:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041122235941/http://www.energy.qld.gov.au/infosite/electricity_generation.html

Strange how Nuclear power looks to the new fake report as the cheapest option. The costs cited don't (as far as I know) include the additional costs of storing the crap afterwards for hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile there have been significant advances in renewable energy during the past 2 years that will have made them even cheaper.

And all this ignores social and security costs. Big, centralised power stations are inherently insecure. In a war, guess what gets bombed first? If solar voltaic cells are distributed then the initial cost might be high, but security is enhanced because there is nowhere to strike, and people are in charge of their own destiny. There is also the point that they don't have to pay through the nose for the rest of their life. (Of course that isn't to say solar voltaic cells don't have their own problems. I'm just using them as an example of the opposite to centralised mega-power.)

Distributed solutions are steadfastly ignored apparently because government is on a short leash from the big-money end of town. But distributed solutions make the most sense. Solar heating is safe, cheap, and after the initial costs, free! Solar cooling is also cheap and after initial costs, upkeep requires little.

This kind of result makes our government look like they're corrupt or liars or stupid.

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

I think nuclear works out cheaper - over the extremely long life of the asset and ignoring any negative environmental impact from ... say a meltdown or storage, but at the moment the up-front costs* are killers.

And I have no idea where they attribute the carbon costs associated with mining and processing the U3O8 ore in their calculations.

There is some new photovoltaic technology being developed (I think Origin Energy were talking about it recently, which uses far less silica in the cells and should slash the cost of power generation considerably (I have it in my head by 90%, but I could be wrong as that would make it more like 3-5 c/kWh.

Given the vast amount of sunlight we have in Australia

The Qld report doesn't include geothermal energy - which wasn't on the map back then in Qld - but from memory if 5% of the areas they think are prospective for hot rocks Qld could be sitting on a conceptual resource of 18 million PJ.

As far as I know we have, in Australian, known reserves of 900,000 PJ of black coal, 400,000 PJ of brown coal and 100,000 PJ in natural gas - no idea if they're proved or not.

Sure, there's some transmission loss issues, but it's extremely cheap to run.

*looks in notes*

According to Geodynamics if you adjust for carbon costs of $30/t:
Clean coal tech + geosequestration costs $70/MWh
Natural gas costs $55/MWh
Nuclear energy costs $45/MWh
Geothermal is far cheaper than nuclear and has no carbon costs, but I'm an idiot and don't have the cost/ MWh handy.


* As a side issue, I can't bit help feeling a bit cynical that Howard, Costello, Dr Dennis Jensen and others in the pro-uranium lobby are setting themselves up for jobs or advisory roles in the future Australian uranium mining industry.
Which will happen regardless of what the Victorian Liberals seem to say about it.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

I forgot about geothermal. Yes. Hot rocks is a much more sensible way to go if they want centralised power generation.

Of course there may be the down side that we don't get to turn the planet into a radioactive wasteland... oh wait... that's not a down side is it.

You know... I keep hearing this crap everywhere about it being OK to mine the uranium and sell it to people because we can take it back and store it here to make sure they don't make it into weapons. I just wonder how they propose to do that. Someone has their hands on enriched uranium and have their hearts set on weaponising it... oh, silly me, of course they'll just hand it back and say "darn, we can't blow someone up now" and everybody will be friends and dance around the maypole and sing nursery rhymes.

There will never be any blank looks where people say, "Huh? Those tons of weapons grade material were here before, but have somehow gone missing. Someone must have misplaced them. Just a clerical error, sir." Of course not. No. That would never happen. Those military men in other countries would snap to attention and do exactly what the Australian puppies politicians say.

Of course.

[annie-lyne.livejournal.com]

What is patently ridiculous in the whole nuclear matter, is that IIRC we don't/won't even use our own excellent technology for storing nuclear waste, Synroc, which essentially nullifies a lot of the technical problems for storing nuclear waste.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

That, more than anything says to me that they're wanting to do naughty things with it. If it was just going to be stored safely then they might actually be considering this (never mind my reservations mentioned above that there is no way to ensure we actually get it back). But they don't want to use synroc. That tells me they sneakily want to use it to enter the weapons cycle. And that is total madness. We need less nuclear weapons, not more.