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Why "Official" Nuke Plant Cost Estimates Are Like Campaign Promises
http://www.carbontax.org/blogarchives/2013/11/21/why-official-nuke-plant-cost-estimates-are-like-campaign-promises/
Why “Official” Nuke Plant Cost Estimates Are Like Campaign Promises
11/21/2013 by Charles Komanoff
In my in-box are a dozen e-mails wanting my reaction to Eduardo Porter’s column in yesterday’s New York Times in which he insisted that of all non-carbon based energy sources, nuclear power is “the cheapest and most readily scalable.”
Whether my correspondents knew that in my former life I meticulously established the spectacular failure of nuclear power plants to stay on budget and produce affordable electricity, or they simply thought I might have a halfway informed opinion on reactors’ proper role in combating the climate crisis, I can’t say. But I dutifully opened up Porter’s column and was quickly appalled.
The column fails the single most critical precept in nuclear economics: don’t confuse promise with performance. I made this point in 1979, a month before the Three Mile Island reactor accident, in a review of a book that plumbed that very theme. I was struck with how the authors of Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved — two business academics with experience in the American and French Atomic Energy Commissions — showed that from Day One nuclear power proponents mesmerized themselves with idealized cost estimates that ignored reactors’ innate complexities and razor-thin tolerances — twin Achilles Heels that time and again broke project budgets and sowed mistrust among policymakers and the public, especially in the U.S.
<snip>
The problems with Porter’s column don’t stop with his slavish adherence to paper estimates of reactor costs. He flogs Germany for its 0.9% bump in CO2 emissions last year (“even as they declined in the United States and most of Western Europe”), ignoring that German GDP grew relative to that of every other major European economy, and that the drop in U.S. CO2 was mostly due to the horrific (and possibly transitory) boom in fracked natural gas.
Indeed, from 2010 to 2012, a two-year period encompassing the March, 2011 Fukushima catastrophe and Germany’s subsequent decision to turn off 29% of its nuclear power production (reducing reactor output from 140.6 terrawatt-hours in 2010 to 99.5 TWh in 2012), Germany actually held constant its use of fossil fuels to make electricity.
How did German society make up for the 41.1 TWh drop in reactors’ electricity generation? Numerically, it was simple:
<snip>
Why “Official” Nuke Plant Cost Estimates Are Like Campaign Promises
11/21/2013 by Charles Komanoff
In my in-box are a dozen e-mails wanting my reaction to Eduardo Porter’s column in yesterday’s New York Times in which he insisted that of all non-carbon based energy sources, nuclear power is “the cheapest and most readily scalable.”
Whether my correspondents knew that in my former life I meticulously established the spectacular failure of nuclear power plants to stay on budget and produce affordable electricity, or they simply thought I might have a halfway informed opinion on reactors’ proper role in combating the climate crisis, I can’t say. But I dutifully opened up Porter’s column and was quickly appalled.
The column fails the single most critical precept in nuclear economics: don’t confuse promise with performance. I made this point in 1979, a month before the Three Mile Island reactor accident, in a review of a book that plumbed that very theme. I was struck with how the authors of Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved — two business academics with experience in the American and French Atomic Energy Commissions — showed that from Day One nuclear power proponents mesmerized themselves with idealized cost estimates that ignored reactors’ innate complexities and razor-thin tolerances — twin Achilles Heels that time and again broke project budgets and sowed mistrust among policymakers and the public, especially in the U.S.
<snip>
The problems with Porter’s column don’t stop with his slavish adherence to paper estimates of reactor costs. He flogs Germany for its 0.9% bump in CO2 emissions last year (“even as they declined in the United States and most of Western Europe”), ignoring that German GDP grew relative to that of every other major European economy, and that the drop in U.S. CO2 was mostly due to the horrific (and possibly transitory) boom in fracked natural gas.
Indeed, from 2010 to 2012, a two-year period encompassing the March, 2011 Fukushima catastrophe and Germany’s subsequent decision to turn off 29% of its nuclear power production (reducing reactor output from 140.6 terrawatt-hours in 2010 to 99.5 TWh in 2012), Germany actually held constant its use of fossil fuels to make electricity.
How did German society make up for the 41.1 TWh drop in reactors’ electricity generation? Numerically, it was simple:
- German solar-photovoltaic generation grew from 11.7 TWh to 28.0 TWh (a rise of 16.3 TWh).
- Wind generation grew from 37.8 TWh to 46.0 TWh (a rise of 8.2 TWh).
- Total consumption of electricity fell by 16.4 TWh (from 610.9 TWh to 594.5 TWh), despite GDP growth.
<snip>
