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Forget Nuclear

Forget Nuclear
Rocky Mountain Institute 9 Oct 08  – “……………….the private capitalmarket isn’t investing in new nuclear plants, and without financing, capitalist utilities aren’t buying. The few purchases, nearly all in Asia, are all made by central planners with a draw on the public purse. In the United States, even government subsidies approaching or exceeding new nuclear power’s total cost have failed to entice Wall Street.
……………………Uncompetitive Costs
The Economist observed in 2001 that “Nuclear power, once claimed to be too cheap to meter, is now too costly to matter”—cheap to run but very expensive to build. Since then, it’s become several-fold costlier to build, and in a few years, as old fuel contracts expire, it is expected to become several-fold costlier to run. Its total cost now markedly exceeds that of other common power plants (coal, gas, big wind farms), let alone the even cheaper competitors described below………………………………….

New nuclear power is so costly that shifting a dollar of spending from nuclear to efficiency protects the climate several-fold more than shifting a dollar of spending from coal to nuclear. Indeed, under plausible assumptions, spending a dollar on new nuclear power instead of on efficient use of electricity has a worse climate effect than spending that dollar on new coal power!

If we’re serious about addressing climate change, we must invest resources wisely to expand and accelerate climate protection. Because nuclear power is costly and slow to build, buying more of it rather than of its cheaper, swifter rivals will instead reduce and retard climate protection.

…………………Nuclear plants have an additional disadvantage: for safety, they must instantly shut down in a power failure, but for nuclear-physics reasons, they can’t then be quickly restarted. During the August 2003 Northeast blackout, nine perfectly operating U.S. nuclear units had to shut down. Twelve days of painfully slow restart later, their average capacity loss had exceeded 50 percent……………………….Lacking investors, nuclear promoters have turned back to taxpayers, who already bear most nuclear accident risks and have no meaningful say in licensing………………….

The Micropower Revolution
While nuclear power struggles in vain to attract private capital, investors have switched to cheaper, faster, less risky alternatives that The Economist calls “micropower”—distributed turbines and generators in factories or buildings (usually cogenerating useful heat), and all renewable sources of electricity except big hydro dams (those over ten megawatts). These alternatives surpassed nuclear’s global capacity in 2002 and its electric output in 2006. Nuclear power now accounts for about 2 percent of worldwide electric capacity additions, vs. 28 percent for micropower (2004– 07 average) and probably more in 2007–08.

An even cheaper competitor is enduse efficiency (“negawatts”)—saving electricity by using it more effi ciently or at smarter times…………….Small Is Fast, Low-Risk, and High in Total Potential
Small, quickly built units are faster to deploy for a given total effect than a few big, slowly built units.

Forget Nuclear

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, radioactive, uranium

October 9, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized