My comments to Dave Borlace’s JHAT
Plus a chart of levelized costs of energy for both conventional and renewable energy.
<< Thanks, Dave, for the informative video.
Nuclear reactors are safe *per TWh* while in operation. The real issues are at the beginning and the end.
The beginnings, as you stated, are the huge cost overruns and construction delays that have plagued the new NPPs. You said the SMRs would cost about $2 billion, but that’s for 450 MW, so for a 3 reactor NPP, equal to a 1400 MW full size NPP, it would cost about $6 billion. The costs of decommissioning NPPs is $2 billion or so. Then there are the costs of transmission lines at about $4 million per mile, so for 500 miles that’s another $2 billion (see reasons below). So we add that up and it comes to $10 billion. But because the NPP is required to have an exclusion zone around it, and it has to be far away from populated areas (which requires long transmission lines and cheap land) so the hundreds of millions for land must be included. (Cont’d below.) >>
<< Part 2 Cont’d
There is one huge issue regarding thermal power plants: they use a huge amount of water. I’ve read that about 40% of total water draw is used by thermal power plants. This obviously is not environmentally friendly. >>
<< Part 3
The video showed a bar chart showing how safe the nuclear power plants are *per TWh*. But that’s the way the shills for nuclear power industry keep people from knowing the big secret.
In The Myths of August by S. Udall, he tells us of the suffering and deaths that uranium miners went through, from lung cancer caused by radon. And this still doesn’t count the deaths that were caused by radiation in the processing plants. If all these were added up they would cause that 0.07% bar to be considerably bigger. >>
One issue that was not discussed is the sources and costs of nuclear fuel. This seems to be very secret information. The sources of nuclear fuel are controlled by the government. The costs are subsidized by the taxpayers.
In the following article, the author states that multiple layers of security costs over $50 million per reactor per year. Over the 50 year lifetime of a reactor, that is more than $2.5 billion.
A quote from this article…
<< The other major reason gets back to renewables as well. 15 years ago it was an arguable position to hold that renewables were too expensive, would cause grid reliability issues and that nuclear in large amounts was necessary. That’s been disproven by both 15 years of failures of nuclear deployments, but more importantly plummeting costs and proven grid reliability with renewable generation. Now almost every serious analyst agrees that renewables can economically deliver 80% of required grid energy, but there is still debate from credible analysts about the remaining 20%. >>
