Orionworks - Steven Vincent Johnson <[email protected]> wrote: > Regarding generating a hydrogen infrastructure, many years ago I recall > Dr. Peter Zimmerman (Dr. Mills' worst nemesis) claiming we should redirect > many of our nuclear plants towards the primary task of cracking H2O into > hydrogen. > No can do. Nuclear power plants are all in use 24 hours a day to generate electricity. They produce baseline electricity. Gas and to a lesser extent coal-fired plants are turned on and off in response to demand but the nukes stay on all the time. They produce ~20% of U.S. electricity. There are only about 100 of them, so taking even one out of service calls for a lot more coal or gas.
Using a nuclear plant part-time or using one for anything other than electricity would be economic insanity. The electricity is very cheap when you generate it 24/7, but it would be hideously expensive if you turned one on and off. That is because the equipment costs outrageous amounts -- $3,850 /kWe officially but I have heard it is more like $6,000 with overruns, interest payments for late projects, etc. "Construction costs are very difficult to quantify but dominate the cost of Nuclear Power" - as one website puts it. Whereas the fuel is very cheap. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Economic-Aspects/Economics-of-Nuclear-Power/ "Fuel costs make up 30 percent of the overall production costs of nuclear power plants. Fuel costs for coal, natural gas and oil, however, make up about 80 percent of the production costs." http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/Costs-Fuel,-Operation,-Waste-Disposal-Life-Cycle See also: Levelized Cost and Levelized Avoided Cost of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2015 http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm I cannot imagine how the French electric power industry works with such a high fraction of their power coming from nuclear reactors. Turn one off and you pay a million bucks a day for nothing! Wind turbines are also very expensive, $3,000 to $8,000 per kilowatt of capacity: http://www.windustry.org/how_much_do_wind_turbines_cost In this case the fuel is absolutely free, even cheaper than uranium. The cost of decommissioning wind turbines is also much lower than nuclear power plants. The cost of a wind turbine accident is negligible, whereas the cost of the Fukushima nuclear accident bankrupted the world's largest power company. The cost of an accident is so high that it would be impossible to buy accident insurance for any nuclear power plant, anywhere in the world. All of them have always been insured by governments. See the Price-Anderson act. Coal is around $3,500/kW these days, with modern pollution controls: http://www.synapse-energy.com/project/coal-fired-power-plant-construction-costs - Jed
