Tom Blees, author of the must read Prescription for the Planet, wrote a concise rebutta to this silly David Noonan op-ed, explaining the causes for the excess costs for financial risk (in the US):
As for the costs of the two AP-1000 reactors proposed to be built in Georgia, those costs of $6.5 billion per reactor can be compared to the first-of-a-kind AP-1000s being built now in China. The FOAK construction of any such major project is normally considerably higher than follow-on units, and indeed the Chinese expect that this modular reactor cost will soon be lowered to nearly half of what these first reactors are costing them, yet even the first ones are estimated to cost $1.9 billion each.
So why should they cost more than three times that much in the USA? No, it’s not because of low Chinese labor costs. Japan was able to build US-designed ABWR reactors for about $1.4 billion per gigawatt, and they import virtually all the materials and pay their workers very well, higher than the USA in general.
The truth is that much of the cost built into nuclear power plants in the USA is the cost of uncertainty because of past experience. No company can be sure that a bunch of protestors with signs might not shut down their project when it’s half-built, as happened too often in the past. That and other weaknesses in the US nuclear power arena inflate prices to these ridiculous levels (compared to Japan, China, Taiwan and South Korea).
It’s not a weakness in the economics of nuclear power per se. Otherwise we would see it everywhere. Are Australians doomed to create the same sort of dysfunctional climate for nuclear power in their own country? If so, then maybe they should stick to coal. But don’t pretend it’s because nuclear power plants can’t be built economically.
We can hope that Australia will not make the same mistakes.
Let me be sure I read that right. This man’s argument is that the cost of nuclear power in the United States is due to the fear of hippies with protest signs showing up during construction?
Please.
I realize why pro-nuclear people want to emphasize the cost issue in regard to nuclear power: because several other issues, most notably the waste-disposal problem, are far more, shall we say, problematic territory for them to discuss. Nuclear advocates have long fallen back on the defense that if we are to eventually rid ourselves of our dependency not just on foreign oil but all oil and other non-renewable, heavily-polluting fuel sources (such as coal), we must begin a transition to such alternative power sources now, in the real world instead of the classroom. And, kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour, nuclear advocates have consistently argued, there is no cheaper and more immediately plentiful source than nuclear.
Although nuclear energy doesn’t blacken the air we (and everything else on the planet) breathe(s) with toxic particulates in the way that coal does, and doesn’t fund terrorism or ruin entire ecosystems with its messy extraction process like oil does, nuclear energy certainly cannot be considered either risk or impact-free to produce or deal with the waste-products it produces. But even leaving aside entirely the problematic nature of the nuclear energy process, the most interesting recent development is that the nuclear advocates’ primary argument – that it is the cheapest “ready-to-go” source of alternative energy available to humanity (which, incidentally, is the exact same argument that the coal industry makes) – for the first time in history, it’s apparently no longer true:
Time to come up with a different reason why nuclear power is better. Cost appears to no longer be a suitable vehicle for advancing the nuclear cause. Or, perhaps, it’s time to recognize that underwriting yet another problematic, dirty energy technology is merely trading one set of environmental problems for another, not moving towards solving the equally important goals of providing for the nation’s (and the world’s) expanding energy demands while also not damaging the only planet we have past the point of livability.