The article and commenters both failed to mention the labor force required to put in so many nuclear plants. Granted, many other technologies need high numbers, but there’s just not that large of a workforce that satisfies all the requirements. First, they have to be nuclear engineer level intelligence. Second they have to be trustable and stable. Third, they have to not compete with each other for the salaries and hiring bonuses that will be inevitable from such a buildup. The current buildup in 2 lousy pipelines across the midwest has driven pipe welders’ salaries into the stratosphere. One friend of mine is making $20,000/month to weld steel! I rather doubt he’s certified for anything nuclear.

Another issue is the construction skills. As everyone knows, when you embark on a massive buildup in anything, corners get cut in the name of saving a buck. Since no one would willingly allow this, it either won’t happen or it will tremendously impact price.

Fuel may be only a small part of the whole nuclear cost, so it’s price independent, but everything else that goes into a plant is inflating at higher than inflation rates now… and we haven’t even turned on the nuclear spiggot yet. Disregarding fuel’s price, who’s to say that the world competition won’t make the fuel scarce at any price?

Comparing nuclear subsidies, in any form, to any single renewable (which SHOULD BE done) or to the entire renewables basket is a joke. Let’s go back and compare nuclear’s 1st commercial year to CSP’s or let’s compare CSP’s 50th year to nuclear today when they’ve each had the same development time. To see why our plants are estimated at $0.10/kwh while the rest of the world is BUILDING CSP below the $0.06/kwh (expecting it to trend down for a long time), look only to the strings attached to the subsidies.

On CSP land use, when well-to-plug land/mwh is considered, CSP uses less land than coal, wind and even nuclear. Did someone forget to add in the mines and storage and all their externalties? CSP plants are fully recyclable and can be designed with no water cooling. Try either of those tricks with nuclear. ..or maybe the time the land is unavailable after the plant closes doesn’t count. Also consider the PERMANENT aquifer contamination of in-situ mining before you suggest it as the only other mining method to reduce land use.

Nuclear can increase it’s scale but CSP cannot? For nuclear to do this, it had to be underscaled in the first place and now be allowed to surpass limits that were deemed unsafe in earlier times. Let’s not suddenly start using 30-40 year old equipment to 120% of the levels they have been time-tested to. CSP is easily scalable on any scale because it’s a more modular technology.

Transmission costs are greater for CSP than nuclear? This is completely dependant on the two sites being compared. Nuclear may be more concentrated in one area so only one ‘link’ needs to be ran, but that same concentration means a guaranteed overload on any existing line. This means a new line is needed for most all new plants. CSP, on the other hand, is usually less dense (typ. 100mw to 900mw per site) and can be sited to spread the load between different lines. Also, remember this concentration applies to the security of the transmission leg as well. What happens to grid stability when someone throws a logchain over the substation feeding a 4+ GW plant?

CSP has yet another benefit over nuclear. While it is hardly maturing yet, it is proven to be economically scalable to dual land uses like parking lots or the commercial, industrial and even the residential level. When they become more accepted, we’ll see that they offer domestic heat as a free waste byproduct. This effectively doubles their contribution for the cost of a heat exchanger. This option has the potential alone to contribute more than a full wedge as merely a spinoff.

I think I’d vote for leaving nuclear in the basket while we concentrate on other forms of energy. I wouldn’t want to end up like France which relies on Denmark to use their excess juice at nighttime because they don’t want to turn their nukes up and down twice a day to follow peak.

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/ 2008/ 05/ campaign-to-sue-al-gore-support.html

The key issues are SCALABILITY and COST PER WEDGE. We didnt get that number, but some thoughts:

1. Wind – great, but its well-known reliability issue that precludes wind from being more than 10-20% of the grid. In Texas they are finding out the truth, wind exists and people exist but they arent close to eachother. A lot of cost to build the grid. More cost to keep the grid stable with variable wind power. You need peaker plants (nat gas?) and/or capacitive power (hydro?) to buffer it.
2. A single solar wedge costs $14 *trillion* ?!? Cant afford it. (Paul K)
Solar PV will come down in price, but even then, solar simply will never be cost-competitive for large scale. Useful for off-grid, remote, some rooftops (maybe) maybe even 3rd world.
This leaves aside the obvious issues of siting for solar and the fact that it will work in some locales (AZ) fine but not others (British Columbia) so well.
3. Nuclear – any wind or solar subsidy would go 10 to 50 times farther in CO2 reductions if applied to nuclear, as the level of subsidy / GW rated is much less and the generation / rated GW is higher than any alternative.
4. the “10 Yucca Mountains” is silly. We can have recycling of used nuclear fuel. Arent we for recycling in other areas, why not used fuel, which is 95% reusable? Do that and you still need only one small repository, and it doesnt even need to geological long-term safe. In other words, disposal is a non-issue, and if you think its enough to derail an AGW solution, then AGW must not be a serious problem to you.

As of right now, today, nuclear is 20% of generation in the US, and 70% in France and close to that in South Korea. In short, there are countries where nuclear is a viable 70% baseload generation solution. There are no countries where any other non-fossil and non-hydro solution gets close to that. Points #1 and #2 tell you that wind and solar wont cut it to even get to 1 wedge, but even if they do, they wont scale beyond it.

Yet when nuclear is raise, we get the scaremongering like this: “(3 nuclear plants built each week for 50 years)” … well, guess what … ANY wedge has those huge scale issues. How many thousands and thousands of wind turbines is a mere 13GW rated? well, that is only a dozen large nuclear plants, but is 13,000 or so wind turbines, consuming thousands of acres and requiring billions in transmission infrastructure to be useful. (For Texas, about $6 billion in such infrastructure on top of the turbine cost).

400 nuclear power plants, or 20/year for 40 years is doable for the US, and they would pay for themselves as with current costs nuclear is actually the cheapest form of energy to generate. Siting is easy – just let any existing site quadruple capacity. BTW the blog earlier states “And the power isn’t cheap: 8.3 to 11.1 cents per kilo-watt hour.” This is clearly false. The actual costs are much lower in the 4-5 cents/KWh range.

Double nuclear again, to about 800 GW rated for the US, and you will have made electricity fossil-fuel free (almost – 75% nuclear 10% wind 10% hydro+solar, 5% nat gas), and displaced most of the transportation energy (with plug-in hybrids) – All it requires is 800 nuclear power plants of 1GW+ each, at a US subsidy cost of under $100 billion *total* (over 40 years, so it is tiny really!), and a move towards wind/solar for 20% of generation.
End result is a reduction of US emissions by 80%, reduction in oil fuel use by 2/3rds.

If a single wedge does this … “requiring one-sixth of the world cropland.” … one has to notice that nuclear energy, with small land footprint, no emissions, is a more benign and less intrusive answer.

It may be that environmentalists will pose the greatest threat to the environment by opposing the one real solution to Global Warming – nuclear power.

Correct.

“The majority of people won’t understand the implications of sustained drought ” Models that show global warming show overall increases in precipitation. Higher CO2 levels allow plants to grow with less water requirements, ie they are more drought tolerant.

The real problem is that the hype is wrong. The models that predicted ‘worst case’ scenarios have been proven wrong by latest satellite measurements and studies of precipation systems. Sea level rise is not accelerating. Temperature rises are not matching models. And the models that use water vapor feedback are gradually getting disproven by data. Just one example:
http://www.uah.edu/News/newsread.php?newsID=875
Tropical cloud cover is a negative feedback in the climate system:
“All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases,” he said. “That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space.”

Recent cooling trends dont disprove global warming, but they should at least make those hyping Global Warming to take notice: Natural climate change is real and the truth is almost surely not as bad as the hype pretends. Dont assume every weather event is due to man. Dont believe the lie that the ’science is done’, its still learning. In the end, things are not even close to FUBAR, unless we destroy the environment or economy in a chimerical quest to end global warming.

Lets not go down this path.

Herschel Specter