When Romm tells you that wind power is available 35% of the time, he says the cost penalty is that you'll need 3 times as much.

Wrong! And misleading!

The main cost penalty is that you also have to build and maintain a carbon or nuclear plant to supply base loads when the wind is not blowing--over and above the cost of wind power. Or have a huge complex of batteries & inverters (DC to AC converters). Or have a dam and turbine to store and generate power with stored pumped water.

Can anyone out there comment on whether the rest of this piece is a fraud as well?

I know, I'm probably just dumb, but here's what I don't understand.

Romm gave a series of escalating estimates for capitalizing construction of a nuclear power plant — starting at a rosy $2000 per kilowatt of generating capacity, he takes us up to twice that much once interest, financing, and other secondary costs come into play. That, he says with triumphant satisfaction, is a much more reasonable estimate!

So, okay, suppose we do Romm one better and say, for the sake of argument, that it costs an even $5,000 per kilowatt to build a nuclear power plant. Then how do we get to these ridiculously high per-kilowatt-hour capital cost estimates?

Only if we assume a timeframe of 5 years do we get anything like the 11 centers per kilowatt-hour estimate. A five year lifespan for any power plant is an absurd assumption!

Any reasonable estimate would have to be within the 25 to 50 year range. Spread out over that timeframe, a $5000/kilowatt capital expenditure would amount to a penny or less per kilowatt-hour generated.

So what's the deal there? Is the idea that a nuclear plant will have to recoup all of its initial capital outlays in the first 5 years of operation? Where does that absurd assumption come from?

And in any case, what about the remaining 20 to 45 years on the plant? At that point the capitalized generation cost is zero. The house is paid off, to use the metaphor, for most of the useful life of the power plant. Where is Romm's argument then?

but something seems not right here. I would like to see some data on the breakdown of these crazy costs. I suspect that a big chunk is in the safety systems required by the massive federal regulations of these plants. Don' get me wrong-the regulations are utterly necessary! American high pressure liquid cooled reactors are very efficient, and very dangerous as well. The French use less efficient, but much safer passive cooled reactors. If an American reactor (which is basically a submarine nuclear powerplant built up in size) fails, it melts down. If a French plant fails completely, it simply shuts itself down.

I think there is a role for rational nuclear power, but the existing utilities are very unlikely to admit they've been wrong and copy the French (of all people...)

Elwin9, where in Romm's article does he say anything that leads you to suspect that he's *not* factoring in the cost of batteries and inverters when he talks about wind power? See what he says about thermal solar:

"Jigar Shah, chief strategy officer of SunEdison, explained to me that he could guarantee delivery to Florida of more kilowatt-hours of power with solar photovoltaics -- *including energy storage so the power was not intermittent* -- for less money than the nuke plants cost."

Romm's idea, as I see it, is that combining wind and thermal solar will let us ease off on unsustainable sources--and one unsustainable source, if you remove the massive sustained government subsidies, is nuclear as it is presently conceived and built. He may be wrong about other things, but he doesn't promise a magic, Green bullet.

Amity, what about those subsidies? If nuclear was in fact amortizable over a reasonable span of years, why would the utility companies need so much money up front? Wouldn't the magic of the marketplace take care of the costs of building reactors, without any need for cumbersome government funding?

I recall reading a multi-part exposé of the nuclear power industry in the New Yorker back in the '70s that exposed the short-sightedness and corruption of the U.S. utilities industry as it was then--imagine, post-Reagan, post-Clinton, post-Bush, post-Enron, how much less incentive there is for the utilities to be transparent and safety-conscious. Nothing against the engineers and workers on the ground, but it was clear that the executives in charge of the power plants were not to be trusted with a helium Underdog balloon for the Macy's parade, let alone fissible materials. As drdave39 suggests, the American public needs to see that this has changed in a tangible way before it tries again with nuclear energy.

What kind of cost-based argument against nuclear power is predicated on leaving aside the question of disposal?

Disposal costs with nuclear power are the exact opposite of initial capital outlay. They grow and grow.

Look at it this way:

When you first start up a nuclear power plant, you don't have any nuclear waste to deal with. Whee! So your generation cost is just uranium, plant operations, and (let's say) paying off your capital outlay.

But of course you start producing this long-lasting radioactive waste. And it (mostly) doesn't go away after the first year — or the first 5 years, or the first 10.

So if a year's worth of waste storage adds a tenth of a cent to the cost of each kilowatt-hour generated, after 50 years it's 5 cents. And it still won't be gone.

And that's if you do it right. You could get around the cost for a while by burying the waste somewhere and pretending that it's gone forever. That's sort of the "zero money down, zero interest" purchase plan. The plan stays in effect until the first waste drums leak into the aquifer, at which point, of course, everything comes due with interest, compounded, payable to the First Bank of Plutonium Ingestion.

Amity, what about those subsidies? If nuclear was in fact amortizable over a reasonable span of years, why would the utility companies need so much money up front?

Well, what about subsidies?

Let's suppose that power plant construction isn't amortizable over anything more than 5 years.

(That's complete horsepucky — builders and developers routinely amortize construction costs over far longer periods. Nobody can convince me that a utility company is a risky borrower. But okay, let's assume it anyway.)

So you need to subsidize initial capital outlays. Fine. Then do it. Now your capital costs are subsidized. No interest, no per kilowatt-hour capitalization cost. End of scenario.

Or am I misunderstanding something?

(And yes, I'm deliberately disregarding your other point about corruption. If we're just going to assume a utility company that's unregulated, poorly managed, and permitted to operate like an organized crime racket, then we may as well throw the entire discussion out the window — cost analysis is beside the point.)