So there are two discussions to have here, one of which is about radiation, the other of which is about nuclear power. It's fair to say that the two discussions are tied together by a lack of familiarity and yes, unfamiliarity breeds fear. For background, I grew up in Los Alamos, NM, the second generation of my family to do so. My father has done radiation monitoring and dosimetry for the past 40-plus years, for the past 20 or so, with NEST. His father was involved in Project Plowshare. It's fair to say that I have the familiarity most people lack. Interestingly enough, my father and I disagree about nuclear power, but more on that in a minute. First, radiation and health. Your linked article is about radiation, and whether or not we're irrationally afraid of it. This is a settled question: as a culture, we're irrationally afraid of it. The tableau of this question is a cave in Germany where people pay to breathe trace amounts of radon. WORTHY OF NOTE: the exposure described is under the levels at which people need to worry about exposure. Those levels are well-researched, at least in the "you're fucked" regime - the article discusses single-digit milliSieverts while "you're fucked" starts at double-digit Sieverts. Even in the context of "irrational fear", you're talking about alternative health treatments maintained within the known limits of safe exposure. This is sort of like homeopathy: at worst, it won't hurt you. The therapeutic effects of radiation, on the other hand, aren't well studied at all. Wiki led me to this study, which I don't see anything obviously wrong with. Wanna see how not settled the whole discussion of low-dose "radiation" is? Here's the Department of Energy, attempting to be clear: All that to say, yes, low dose radiation risk is virtually impossible to quantify and low dose radiation benefit is virtually unstudied. Could we study it more? Sure. Will we? Not unless you have a radioactive cave you're trying to monetize. "Things that are radioactive" are bad to keep on the shelves because obviously, concentration matters and the workers who handle it get a lot more exposure than you do. Thus, medicinal radiation is mostly limited to aggressive cancer treatment and alternative health spas. Nuclear power appears at first to be linked to these concerns. I'm not convinced it is. China is dealing with a full-fledged environmental apocalypse from coal but their future plans are only 3% nuclear. Most of our nuclear plants were built back in the '50s and '60s when the externalities could be easily masked. The best breakdown I've seen on the actual costs of nuclear power are by Bill Mckibben in his book Eaarth. Look inside starting on page 57. TL;DR: nuclear plants aren't being built because if they are completed on time and within budget, they pump power out at around 17-22 cents per kW/h, a figure that can be beat by pretty much everything else. Check this shit out: If your choice is 7 cents per kWh for solar or 17 cents per kWh for nuclear, nuclear is a tough muffukin' choice to make. And I think that is a fact nobody has wanted to talk about: nuclear is unpopular because it's too expensive at the best of times. My father disagrees. He thinks nuclear power hasn't been widely adopted because of paranoia and fear. He's also the kind of guy who kept plutonium in the garage. But then, he hasn't looked at the economics, so far as I know.
McKibben: Yeah, nuclear power, I mean—it’s just too expensive. It really isn’t going to happen. I wrote a big piece in National Geographic about energy in China, and even the Chinese, they’re spending more than anybody [on nuclear] and they’re saying it’ll be three percent of their electricity supply. It’s not viable. The really cool thing—here is a book to go look at. It just came out as a ninety-nine cent Kindle Single. It’s by a guy named Osha Davidson, it’s called Clean Break, and it’s about what’s going on in Germany, which is un-fucking-believable. Munich’s north of Montreal, and there were days this month when they got half their energy from solar panels. It has nothing to do with technology or location—it’s all political will, and they have it.
We have an interestiung relationship with nuclear power. One of our secondary political parties (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) originated out of the anti-nuclear and pro-environment movements, and as they were the primary coalition partner of the SPD, they could dictate energy policy since it was their core competency. Regenerative energies were also developed as alternatives to nuclear energy by oppentens who wanted something better. We've always had a very strong anti-nuclear movement. That said, we're definitely irrationally afraid of it. Personally, I don't like the risk a nuclear reactor poses. However, I find the low risk better than definitely impacting the atmosphere with coal and gas power, which is what a big chunk of nuclear energy is being replaced with. And that's because providers can't build new nuclear plants. I feel like the risk assessment is off. Yeah, a reactor might melt down, but CO2 is just as deadly, if in the long run. So I prefer reactors over coal power plants, as long as we can't go 100% regenerative. The economics side is something I couldn't find reliable data on, but the data I did find didn't suggest a big difference in cost. Nuclear power still has lots of disadvantages, yeah. It shouldn't be used more than is absolutely necessary. But it's a great source of energy.
Here you go.The economics side is something I couldn't find reliable data on, but the data I did find didn't suggest a big difference in cost.
Given this discrepancy, nuclear’s history of cost overruns, and the fact new generation designs have
never been constructed any where, there is a major business risk nuclear power will be more
costly than projected. Recent construction cost estimates imply capital costs/kWh (not counting
operation or fuel costs) from 17-22 cents/kWh when the nuclear facilities come on-line. Another
major business risk is nuclear’s history of construction delays. Delays would run costs higher, risking
funding shortfalls. The strain on cash flow is expected to degrade credit ratings.
Generation costs/kWh for new nuclear (including fuel & O&M but not distribution to customers)
are likely to be from 25 - 30 cents/kWh. This
high cost may destroy the very demand the
plant was built to serve. High electric rates may
seriously impact utility customers and make
nuclear utilities’ service areas noncompetitive
with other regions of the U.S. which are
developing lower-cost electricity.
Craig A. Severance, CPA is co-author of The
Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger
1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to
Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce
Commission. His practice is in Grand Junction, CO.
I was talking german sources, sorry. It's not directly comparable because for example the emission trading, subsidies and stuff. But if it's not economically viable, I'd still prefer a environmentally-friendly alternative.
If the neoliberal economic calculations of supply and demand are not taking into account important externalities like carbon emissions, can we really say that the advertised cost is the true cost? I feel like that's the biggest mental roadblock for me literally looking at some table "of this costs that per kWh" and assuming it's that simple. I doubt the free market, as it currently exists, is accurately pricing the true costs of these energy forms; I suppose subsidies and other political price meddling could theoretically account for some of those externalities, but that seems like a bandaid, not a solution, and even then only assuming the politicians have an accurate understanding of what those externalities are.
Effectively, you're saying "since there are unexamined externalities on both sides, nuclear must be cheaper."If the neoliberal economic calculations of supply and demand are not taking into account important externalities like carbon emissions, can we really say that the advertised cost is the true cost?
Well, I don't think I'm trying to say nuclear specifically must be cheaper, but I don't think the traditional accounting of costs for fossil fuel sources are taking into account a very significant externality, which if it were factored in, would make nuclear, and other renewable sources, much more competitive. I'm not trying to make some round about argument that nuclear is somehow the cheapest source of energy, it certainly isn't; however, if we're looking at carbon-neutral energy sources that can generate large amounts of power, day and night, rain or shine, without specific geographic and weather requirements, using technology we have right now, to my uneducated eyes, nuclear looks to be at the top of the list. I know some people want to push for only renewables, which is fine, but I'm not convinced we could entirely replace fossil fuels with renewables as quickly as we ought to be.
You know what? Now you've got me wondering. veen - this seems like something you might be curious about, too. Can we find a good source of information as to the actual costs of power generation using, say, nuclear, coal, solar and hydro... accounting for externalities? 'cuz I find a bunch of .pdf sources I simply don't have time for this week, and I'd like to know more.
Thanks for the shoutout - I am interested in the answer, so I've done some cursory searching and I found this Dutch paper. This was the backbone to a public debate some years ago on whether The Netherlands should go all for nuclear energy as a main source of energy. It's issued by the government and answers a very interesting question: how much would it cost for an investor per kWh to produce energy, on a national scale, over 30 years of use? They compare nuclear, wind and biomass with coal and gas energy production and also calculate how much more expensive it would be if the CO2 from coal and gas were captured at 20 to 50 euros per tonne CO2. It doesn't give an exact number; rather, the study looks at a priceband. This is not because of all externalities, but it accounts for construction and operational risks and future price changes. See it as the range of prices to base a business case on. I translated the resulting graph: So it can be lower, although the priceband shares half of its range with regular coal and gasification. They have this to say on externalities: That is surprisingly low, especially since CO2 storage adds about 1 to 2 cents per kWh with regular coal. I don't know if that covers all externalities you are interested in, but it's better than nothing. I also found this Wiki page. It goes in-depth on the Levelized Cost of Electricity, LCOE, which is the cost of capital (buildings & equipment), maintenance and fuel divided by the amount of energy produced over its lifetime. It does not include taxes and subsidies. It's based on this research paper, and has this graph for Germany in 2013: If you look at the history of U.S. projections, you can see that coal is now around 20% cheaper than nuclear and 4 times as cheap as solar. The projection for 2020 is that coal and nuclear will be the same price, but that solar will have gone from 4 times as expensive to just a bit more expensive than coal - dropping 68% over 5 years. As you said, it's only a matter of time. I'm not sure if this is enough of an answer - if anyone knows more about this stuff, feel free to chip in. flagamuffin?
Large-scale electricity production can create external costs and benefits. [...] Examples of this are damages to health because of air pollution, costs of climate change and the certainty of energy demand. [...] A study by Bollen en Eerens (2007) calculated the health benefits of cleaner air and reduced CO2 impact when choosing nuclear over coal to be around 0.5 eurocents per kWh.
Subsidies are the government saying that they are willing to pay more to see this done. It's no different than other publically-funded ventures. Especially since the costs are also mainly taxes.
...right. Externalities. Subsidies affect the price, not the cost. Gas prices are dimes per gallon in Saudi Arabia. Doesn't mean gas is magically a fraction of the cost there as it is in the US; doesn't mean gas in the US is a fraction of the cost that it is in Germany. It means that part of it is being paid by someone else. It's still being paid. Solar is "cheaper" in China right now because China is heavily subsidizing panel development and production. They have incentive to. But once you strip away the externalities, the costs of solar are going down, in no small part because of that subsidized development. So you still have to pick where your economic boundaries are... but a rational boundary around nuclear (ignoring subsidies, including overruns) price it as very expensive. Does that make sense to you?
Oh, yeah, I get what you're saying. Thing is, energy providers will look at the price when deciding whether to build a nuclear plant or a few coal plants.
I would just like to say I think you oversimplified the cost comparisons. Wikipedia has an article about cost of electricity by source and it's a little more complicated than "TLDR: Nuclear expensive, solar cheeep!" Also, I kinda have to lol at that website you found the graph on... Feels like advertainment website to me, just by looking at the "about us" page.The content produced by this site is for entertainment purposes only. Opinions and comments published on this site may not be sanctioned by, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sustainable Enterprises Media, Inc., its owners, sponsors, affiliates, or subsidiaries.