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In global terms, the cost of electrical power production is hardly an
problem. Carbon dioxide emission possibly is. In this respect there is little
to choose between fossil fuels; nuclear power stations emit more CO2 through
their construction and eventual decommissioning than they save during their
operating lifetime; the CO2 construction costs of "renewable" sources are
also far from negligible, and they mostly need backup to cover unfavourable
weather - geothermal & hydro is probably the best bet but opportunities are
governed by geography and usually in the wrong place.
I find that difficult to believe - do you have some hard figures to back it up? The math just doesn't add up for me:
- Construction costs for Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) are higher than for Fossil-Fuel burning plants, due to added complexity, safety, and regulatory burdens, but we're talking at most an order of magnitude - a typical figure is around a billion dollars for a gigawatt-class NPP. Note that while this (like the cost estimates for any other kind of construction) doesn't factor in the hidden cost of nonrenewable resources being consumed, most of the materials used in an NPP are conventional construction materials - concrete and steel - which while strictly speaking may not be renewable, are not in any kind of short supply. So I would argue that the nonrenewables cost is not exorbitant, and the extraction/processing costs are of course factored into the construction cost.
- Fuel: extracting uranium ore is no different than any other kind of mining - every kind has its own hazards, U-mining probably has a slight added expense due to the (very slight) radioactivity of the raw ore. The energy needed to extract the Uranium (i.e. the naturally occurring mix of U238 and U235) and concentrate the U235 to reactor-acceptable levels (around 10%) via gasification and centifugation is likely non-negligible, but certainly miniscule compared to the energy that can be extracted from the resulting reactor-grade fuel (it's the old chemical-energy-versus-nuclear-binding-energy ratio at work here - basic thermodynamics vs. e=mc^2). Transporting the fuel to the reactor is trivially costly relative to its value. Disposing of the spent fuel is also no easy task, and that problem hasn't been long-term solved yet, but we're talking about a sequestration cost, i.e. how much does it cost to find a suitable geologically stable storage site. Once that's been done many plants can use it and the cost gets amortized. Note that fossil fuels also have an unsolved sequestration problem, as the CO2 is currently just getting dumped into the air we breathe - not toxic in the short term, but quite possibly disastrous in the long term.
- Operating expenses: again, probably more so than a conventional plant, but not by orders of magnitude. Otherwise no utility would ever even try to build an NPP in the first place.
- Decommisioning: conservatively (i.e. worst-case scenario) probably on the order of a billion dollars per plant. Like construction, much of this is regulatory/safety/construction related, i.e. I don't see how this consumes some massive CO2-equivalent of resources, aside from the potential political hot air when a decommissioning causes problems in some congressman's political district. ;)
Now, let's weigh that against the value of the electricity produced: a GW-class NPP, even if averaging just 60% capacity on a 24/7/365 basis, will produce ~5 TW-hours of electricity per year. Assuming an operational lifetime of 20 years (conservatively short) that's a lifetime total of ~100 TW-hours, with an approximate market value (based on a nominal consumer cost of US$0.10 per KW-hour) of US$10 billion. (I'm using "billion" in the US sense, i.e. billion = 10^9.)
To produce that much electricity requires TEN THOUSAND TONS PER DAY of coal to be burned in a conventional coal-fired plant (and a relatively high-efficiency one at that - here's a link with some typical numbers: http://www.meic.org/Roundup.html). That is a huge number - how is a NPP possibly going to produce that much equivalent CO2, even with very conservative (in the sense that we assume larger hidden costs for everything than we can really justify) estimates of indirect costs and nonrenewable-resource costs?
Luke Welsh is somewhat of a resident nuke power expert - Luke, what's your take on this? (I suspect Luke would rather discuss global CO2 emissions due to the drinking of fine Weizenbier, but first work, then play... :D
Cheers, -Ernst
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