Ronn Blankenship schreef:
> At 04:03 PM 7/19/01, Jeroen wrote:
> >At 22:24 18-7-01 -0400, John Giorgis wrote:
> >
> >>AFAIK, nobody in the West has built a nuclear power plant in 10, if not 25
> >>years.
> >
> >It takes only one case to disprove that, so I'll limit myself to just one.
> >
> >Plant: Emsland PWR
> >Location: Lingen, Niedersachsen, Germany
> >Initial criticality: 04/1988
> >Commercial start: 07/1988
> >
> >Source: International Nuclear Safety Center, http://www.insc.anl.gov.
>
> Versus how many closed or left uncompleted during that same 25 years?
This made me think. Germany had a major financial hickup due to nuclear power.
One of their nuclear powerplants, the one at Kalkar (sp?) never was completed
and remained a multi billion mark building ruin for over 20 years, costing money
untill they finally decided to dismantle it a couple of years ago. It never
produced any energy whatsoever.
Considering something like this in the light of the argument that nuclear power
is rather cheap, is a fiasco like the one at Kalkar calculated into the total
cost for nuclear power? And what about building a power plant? And the running
costs for waste disposal and storage? (after all a nuclear power plant (of a
capacity around 2600 MW) produces around 85 kg of highly radio active waste
containing about 0.85 kg of plutonium a day) And there is the powering down
costs and the costs for dismanteling a reactor after it has served it's term? Or
how about the insurance costs against accidents? Just wondering. Especially
since most of these costs are usually featured into the cost for other energy
sources.
And there is another thing I wonder about. Who pays for building, powering down
and dismanteling a nuclear facility? I find it rather strange that a company can
make a profit considering those rather horrendous costs. Maybe if they have
special benifits like in Germany or something?
Just asking.
Sonja
