cost to dispose of waste -- a federal promise long ago -- is now said to be $90 billion.

to put waste in Yucca mountain, starting in 2017, or whenever the Congress lacks a powerful Nevada congressaman.

end-to-end does nuclear save over the oil used to grind up rocks, refine u235/238, build power plants, etc?

Here's a quick question.
All-in cost, versus Overnight cost.

Why would Overnight cost be considered appropriate for power plants with long build schedules, especially when compared to other power plant types with relatively short build schedules.

-David Ahlport

if wind/solar are similar to coal/nuclear, high capital cost and low variable cost, why isn't there more interest in wind/solar?  or is that why there is as much interest as there is?

This clears up the picture somewhat.

Which category does distributed generation, like roof mounted solar and biogas cogeneration fit into?

Can utilities guarantee a set price to home and farm owners who sell power into the grid?  If government provides a fixed per kwh subsidy to home and farm power, would that help the utilities cope with variability issues with renewables?

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

High capital cost near zero variable cost of conservation and efficiency would eclipse coal, nuclear, solar, wind.  Regulatory reform is starting to allow utilities to rate base negawatts

I wouldn't quite say wind/solar is similar to coal/nuclear.  Wind is definitely competitive, and - even before you get into all the tax incentives - presents a more compelling economic proposition than either.  Which explains why there's been so much growth in wind construction over the last decade and so little (damn near zero) in coal and nuke.

Solar - of the PV variety - is still much more expensive on an all-in basis and really follows the gov't incentives more than fundamental economics right now.  That said, even if solar was cheap, it faces separate challenges of scale, in the sense that the modern utility model doesn't handle small investments very well.  A big, publicly traded utility makes decisions about capital allocation based on their impacts on earnings per share.  Since the optimal size for solar tends to be small, the utility model simply can't get excited about small (e.g., <$100 million) capital projects.  This isn't a problem with the utility model per se, but simply a challenge of any big organization.  (Jack Welch said famously of GE that they had "fat fingers" that often kept them from picking up interesting, small things.  Same deal here.)

All that said, I think the wind industry deserves some culpability as well, if only by comparison to coal.  Coal has convinced the world that their power is cheap by only talking about variable costs.  Wind has convinced the world that their power needs subsidies by always talking about the all-in costs.  Both are narrowly true, but they are not comparable, and they have created a public perception of the comparative costs of those two options - sustained by self-interests on both sides - that are not only at odds with reality, but have the potential to push financial resources in the wrong direction.

Both all-in costs and variable costs are useful to know.  My point is simply that both are needed to answer different questions, and too often we use the wrong number to answer the right question.  If I want to know how often a given plant is going to run, it's good to know the overnight cost.  On the other hand, if I want to know whether an investment in a given plant is a good one, I ought to look at the overall cost.

Environmentally, coal highlights the challenge with confusing them.  All-in, they're very expensive, and lousy investments unless we get the equity guaranteed.  So we get equity guarantees based on the fallacy that they are cheap.  That wouldn't be bad if they didn't run (e.g., if the overnight costs were high).  But their overnight costs were low, so now that we've guaranteed the equity on an expensive plant, that plant now has an economic reason to run - and pollute - even at the expense of plants with a lower environmental signature (like natural gas, although there are certainly better options as well) that would have had lower all-in costs, but didn't get built because of a variable cost comparison... which is the wrong number to compare for investment purposes.

Swap "coal" for "wind" or "nuke" above (just to take lower carbon technologies), and one may conclude that the result is a good one.  But even if it is, it's still based on shoddy economic logic.  

May bold a nice future if and when we see national leadership that makes the choice
to value green sustainable solutions.

Otherwise we get more of the same, with very
little change.

Who are you voting for?

Ecosystems empowerment for the rural poor.

The types of power plants I had in mind was Nuclear versus Solar Thermal.

With Nuclear having around a 7-15 year permitting+build schedule.
And SolarThermal having a 1-4 year permitting+build schedule.

If you compare these two technologies purely on Overnight costs, you get a rather distorted view of things due to the time difference.

-David Ahlport