Dear AEMan

I guess I don't get your point. Just pointing out facts of how much electricity is generated by nuclear power plants doesn't mean they're the right choice. Sixteen percent of worldwide energy being produced by nuclear power means 84% is not produced by nuclear power. The fastest growing source of energy is wind power. I've lost almost all respect for business leaders in the last few years due to all the business scandels, but I don't think these folks are building wind farms to lose money.

Yes, there may be some studies that can show nuclear power to be economical. However they generally fail to include the hidden costs mentioned in the previous post: security, nuclear proliferation, terrorist attacks, insurance, outright government subsidies, etc. These are all costs that we pay as a country, NOT the individual user. If they were included in the analysis, then nuclear power would not be economical. If the TRUE cost of the electricity were in the electric bill, then I would be all for it.

In addition, paying off the right politician has a lot to do with bad ideas being promulgated.

I think my original point still stands. That 1000 MWe nuclear power plant that supplies 773,000 homes cost a certain amount of capital. If that capital were instead spent on building near-zero-energy homes, and/or making existing homes more efficient, then that plant would not have been needed in the first place.

One more thing for all the supply-siders to think about. Without conservation, energy demand grows at an exponential rate. It is impossible to indefinitely supply energy to meet exponentially growing demand. The only smart thing to do is to affect demand. And there is plenty of available technology to enable us to do that. It will also save you money.

We can go on a long time, and I don't have a fast enought connection to get all the information I need, however........

Neither of the sites you provide show the cost of nuclear-generated power. However, knowing people that get their electricity from different utilities, and having previously worked at a company that used to design nuclear plants, as well as coal- and gas-fired power plants....the typical cost for nuclear power-generated electricity is $0.10-0.12/kW-hr, coal and natural gas are usually $0.06-$0.08. Many utilities own several different types of power plants so there is sometimes overlap in these numbers.

Generally in terms of expense: for conventional fuels, natural gas is cheapest, followed by coal followed by nuclear. Wind power, in the right location, is comparable to coal-fired power plants, and solar cells are comparable to nuclear in cost. Unfortunately this information is from articles I have read and I don't usually save them for reference.

From the American Wind Energy Association, wind power is the fastest growing source of electrical energy. It has grown at 28%/year from 1999-2003.

http://www.awea.org/pubs/factsheets/FastFacts2004.pdf

I would say that any power source growing at that rate has to be more economical than other sources.

When I wrote that no nuclear power plants have been built in decades I was speaking about the US. So I'll give you that one since I wasn't specific enough. But there have been many power plants built in the US in the last 30 years, just no nukes.

Statistics do not show that nuclear power is cheaper. If we really wanted to see which would win out, we would need a true free market. We should stop subsidizing all power plants, whether through research, tax breaks, insurance, security, etc. The number one winner would be conservation.

The true cost of the nuclear power plant is not in the customer's bill. Taxpayers pick up the tab for a lot of expenses, and risks. As for all the other countries you mentioned, if we had access to their data, I would bet that there are many hidden costs that the ratepayers are picking up, either through their taxes, or through higher risk due to lower safety standards.

If any nuclear power plant gets built in this country, look for a lot of taxpayers to be footing the hidden costs.

In your favor, Vince, if hybrids get twice as much mileage and the population doubles by 2050, we'd only using as much gasoline as we do today for cars if all were hybrids. Though I see nukes as necessary, conservation and efficiency are just as important or the number of reactors could become alarmingly great. Winds, ethanol, solar, etc. will all be a part of the future. What ever became of OTEC? Why not OTECs combined with stirling motors to make the hydrogen? Of course, I think liquid NH3 is the autofuel of the future for fuel cell hybrids. Maybe I'm just nuts, but investigate AES first before you committ me to the asylum!

OK, found the correct article.

Nukes exist only because they can suck up unlimited government (tax money) funds. They do not and have never been a sound ($) business proposition.

What this has to do with hybrid cars is simple. The hybrid is an example of an emerging technology that has great potential to address future energy needs. If we dump billions down the nuke rat hole, those billions are no longer available for long range solutions like the hybrid. For this reason alone, nukes are a bad option.

Hybrids are not our only option. There are also BEVs and wind turbines and photovoltaics and others. There is also great potential for much greater efficiency through technology. If nukes were our only option, they would be, at best, a very lousy option.

How far could we advance solar generation or wind or biomass with this kind of government backing? How much more advanced would the battery in a BEV or hybrid be, by now, if we had spent as much Gov. funds on Battery technology?

My personal feeling is that if nukes produced toxic waist that lasted 25 years, they would be a last resort. Waist that last 250 years would boot them out of the running. But waist that lasts 25,000 years is a ridiculous proposition. The epitome techno arrogance. However, if the nuke backers are able to move the Yucca Mountain facility to Washington DC, I am all for it.

"The industry has lots of friends in Washington, D.C. Last year utilities chipped in $42.6 million in lobbying and contributions to politicians, three-quarters of that to Republicans, reports the Center for Responsive Politics. The Bush White House is sympathetic to nukes. The Department of Energy in 2002 launched Nuclear Power 2010 to get a new reactor built by the end of the decade. It's more than a nudge: The plan also suggests a taxpayer-backed fund for engineering costs; the industry proposes direct or loan guarantees by the feds and electricity purchases by the government.

Utilities have gotten federal subsidies even as the infamous Energy Bill has languished year after year. With all the negative press on the proposed drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Congress has tacked on $35 million here, $29 million there to its annual spending bill to help the nuclear industry conduct site and permit work. When a marked-up energy bill makes the rounds early this year, it will likely suggest further study of options for fuel recycling and earmark $1.8 billion to get new reactors built pronto.
The bill does not yet give NuStart what it wants most of all: government guarantees of construction loans for new, untested reactor designs. Such backing would help lower the cost of borrowing. (Without the guarantee, the bonds would most likely be rated slightly lower than the utilities' other bonds.) But why stop there? The utilities also want two fat tax credits--one allowing them to deduct 20% of their spending on new reactors and a second to lop off 1.8 cents for every kilowatt-hour of power produced by the new plants. That's the same treatment Congress granted wind-turbine makers in 2003.

That last sticks mightily in some craws--particularly that of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Applied to the average 1,000-megawatt power plant, the credit would result in tax breaks of $150 million a year. That's too high a price for Michele Boyd, legislative director for antinukers at Public Citizen, the Nader-founded group. "They want cradle-to-grave subsidies in order to try to make nuclear power competitive," she complains. "

http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2005/0131/084_3.html

Gentlemen:

It seems strange to keep a fairly lively discussion about nuclear power going on a hybrid car website, so I think this will be the last time I comment on it (maybe ;-) ). Besides, hybrids and energy efficiency investments go together.

I haven't commented on this website for a while since I just picked up my '05 Prius two weeks ago and I am still playing with it.

I'm not necessarily against nuclear power, I just don't think it will make sense--economically, environmentally, etc.--for at least 100 years. The reason I say this is because I believe there is so much waste out there now, whether in gas, electric, gasoline, oil, etc. that we can reduce energy demand for a long time without needing subsidies to increase supply.

I believe it is much better to provide incentives and penalties on the demand side than on the supply side. Encouraging people to reduce demand for energy (raw materials too, etc.) will enhance the free market and let it work its magic much better than incentives on the supply side. Supply side incentives generally go to a few large companies that generally don't have my (our) best interests in mind. But demand side incentives let me (us) decide what we want to buy, and let the corporations supply that demand, which is the way it is supposed to work. Supply side incentives are also hidden and therefore we as consumers don't pay the true cost of a product, since it is already subsidized before we buy it (I'm talking oil, electricity, gas here, but I believe this works for other products as well).

And as I mentioned in previous posts, it is cheaper to give people money to buy efficiency, than to give a corporation money to produce power, or drill for oil or gas. The subsidy would be the same in both cases, but the benefit to the economy and the country is better for the first method. Since windpower is much cheaper than nuclear power, I also think the hydrogen economy can be fueled using windpower and again nuclear power won't be necessary for a long time, it at all.

As a consumer, I would rather put my money into a hybrid car, than keep buying more oil/gasoline. California (I'm from Ohio) pays roughly $21 billion per year on health-care related costs due to diesel particulate pollution alone. (Gasoline vehicles also produce soot, just not as much.) This is from a Union of Concerned Scientists report "Sick of Soot." I may not see a payback from helping to reduce that soot, but the country as a whole does and that's good enough for me.

guys - admit it. oil power controls the future energy methods we will see.

british petrolium & shell oil are the largest suppliers of solar electric panels.

of course solar power has been researched & developed by oil money & will magically become available once all the easy oil has been pulled from the ground.

it's a shame we dropped the nuke energy so totally 30 years ago. with today's technology in design & manufacture we could build VERY reliable plants.

everyone here is arguing nukes based on 40 year old technology.

to turn out backs so completely on nukes is like turning our backs on fire because we can get burned.

see ya

Steve, many universities are founded upon the principles that all business and corporations are inherently evil. Proof of this is in folks like the professor in Colorado who said the real terrorists in the September 11th attacks were the people who worked in the World Trade Center.

Universities have been the biggest proponents of solar power in the world. They get their own research budgets, their own staff, their own labs, and conduct their own experiements. Last time I checked, no one has been able to get much more than 16% efficiency out of a solar panel. The sun produces about 1000 watts of power per square meter, which means we can turn that into maybe 150 watts under ideal conditions.

No one has been able to do much better than that, even in the labs. If you did even 10 minutes of research on solar power you'd stop with the conspiracy theory act about how oil companies are stopping solar power or whatever.

Environmentalists too often rely upon fear to motivate the public against nuclear power. Terrorist attacks are the latest bogieman, as is "nuclear proliferation". But all these things are scare stories appealing to emotion. The fact is there are countries like Iran and Korea that will have nuclear weapons at some point ,no matter what the US government decides about nuclear power. They don't have anything to do with each other.

Wind and solar are nice in theory but they won't supply the power that the world needs, they are not realistic solutions to burning coal or natural gas for electricity.

My theory why environmetalists generally hate nuclear power; because nuclear power came about because the hippy generations parents created it. It was part of the "establishment". It was created by the "military industrial complex", so it's inherently bad. This is an extremely childish view, but it sums up the root of the problem.

There are exceptions. European environmentalists are increasingly pro-nuclear, after seeing several failures of wind and hydroelectric plants to create sustainable power and meet the Kyoto treaty obligations in the short run. Germany and Sweden are slowly halting the shutdown of their reactors, as well. James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia hypothesis, is pro nuclear-energy, as are many other European greens. But it would only be fair to say this is controversial, even among European greens.

Try this notion: wind and solar are not sustainable practices when used as centralized power generation.

As mentioned earlier the big Euro efforts with wind did not pay off. All of the utilities who have tried end up with an average availability of the windmills to produce power only 30% of the time. Worse for solar. Sinking money into wind farms that sit idle while other sources, probably fossil based, are lighting up the grid is not cool with me.

That being said, I think wind and solar work on a decentralized basis, where the individual can make the decision about the high capital cost and uncertain payback period. But for the central power distribution it is absolutely necessary to have a reliable source that can kick in any time to pick up the slack on those windless nights.

In order to meet this need in a carbon-free manner, we can either go build an orbiting solar array and figure out a way to beam the power back to earth or we could start building nukes. I recall someone earlier was talking about economic viability....