You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap...
Matthew Wald, Energy reporter for The New York Times, has written the cover story for Scientific American's special edition, Earth 3.0. Wald's piece, "Can Nuclear Power Compete?", went online Tuesday and is currently the most-read energy story on the SciAm site. The pull quote,
Comments
The costs of electricity from windmills is in Germany (22000 MW installed) paid with 9,2 c (euro) about 13 c$
The investment costs for windmills given looks very low. It needs to be mentioned as well that a windmill is usually producing on average 17% of nominal capacity a nuclear plant at more than 80%. Though the investment needs to be multiplied x4
The electricity from windmills is erratic. It does not replace any coal fired plant. These plants needs to be kept on fire in case of low wind. Though this electricity is nearly useless.
Vandale
A recent wind analysis specific to ERCOT in Texas showed that 80% of wind's production displaced nat gas but about 20% displaced coal (see top of pg. 21).
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~jcullen/Documents/measuring%20wind.2008.11.13.pdf
Here's a whole report on wind capacity factors and how they are generally exaggerated. The report mentions a European average of 21% over the last 5 years.
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/boccard-windpowercapacityfactorreality.pdf
I'd like to see the source for the German wind cost data. The US is running about 4-8 cents/kWh. That puts wind in a highly competitive position relative to other new plants in the US.
We always have nat gas plants on reserve whether wind is part of the picture or not. These plants are literally paid whether they run or not. If the US had a rational demand side management plan that included voluntary real time pricing measures you wouldn't have to rely on reserve capacity so much.
Electricity is electricity whether it comes from a nat gas plant or a wind plant. The primary criteria
that differentiates the generation technologies should always be cost. For wind this should include the costs of maintaining a reliable supply of electricity in the face of wind's variability. These costs are real (about 1 cent/kWh) but they are hardly the deal breaker that they're made out to be.
The windpower 2030 from the DOE pegged the additional costs from wind to be lower than 1c/kWhr. Such costs are lowered with better predictive modeling so that standby generators are kept off when not used.
I do find that the overal costs of that are put up are contradictory to other sources. For wind, in 2007, the installed costs went up to the $1700's. The cost per kWhr is totally derived from who knows what since there is no actual reference to any factors like discount rate or what it actually is.
It seems like a delivered cost which would artificially lower the price of nuclear since it wouldn't include the interest charges on the large capital costs. A better overal scheme would be to use levelized costs rather than delivered costs. From I believe the IEA, levelized costs would make coal the cheapest, wind second and nuclear trailing third.
I found the article to be somewhat balance in what could derail nuclear but way too pessimistic in it's evaluation of alternative generation and technologies.