You wrote, "Nope... but it does have intermittency issues, dramatically higher transmissions costs and a requirement for backup generation, storage, grid upgrades, or a willingness to do without electricity on occasion. None of which (except perhaps part of the second) is included in the quoted price."
Nuclear also has "intermittency issues" and they are of far more consequence than those associated with wind. We can predict virtually all of the outages for wind, they are short lived, and they are of a nature that doesn't cause dramatic shifts in the supply/demand balance of the grid -nuclear outages are sudden and large scale, last days weeks and often years and they cause chaos for the grid operators.
This means that wind actually requires less back-up generation than nuclear. If local wind turbines slow down, the ones down the road are almost always picking up from the traveling breeze. If a nuclear plant blows a valve, scrams and suddenly goes down, you'd better hope that the nearest coal plant has a couple of idled boilers fired up with their generator shafts turning (real spinning reserves of the worst sort) or you are liable to have a major cascading blackout.
Grid upgrades, storage etc are just as problematic with conventional sources as each grid configuration creates such niches and incurs their related costs.
Nuclear waste, nuclear weapons proliferation, meltdowns with concentrated, massive releases of radioactive toxins and skyrocketing costs are the trademarks of nuclear.
How are the Flammanville and Olkiluoto projects coming along? On time and on budget or years behind and massively over-budget?
38 years of nuke profit up in smoke?
Kyodo
...Kenichi Oshima, an environmental economist and professor at Kyoto-based Ritsumeikan University, estimates that Tepco in that time earned just less than ¥4 trillion, possibly equal to or less than the amount it must pay farmers, fishermen, evacuees and others affected by the nuclear crisis.
Oshima also found that the cost of nuclear power generation is higher in Japan than that of hydraulic and thermal power, contrary to a widely disseminated government estimate.
By analyzing Tepco's financial statements, Oshima put its cumulative profits from its nuclear power business at ¥3.995 trillion between the business years of 1970 and 2007, which ended in March 2008. Tepco operates three nuclear power plants — the six-reactor Fukushima No. 1 plant, four-reactor Fukushima No. 2 plant and seven-reactor Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata Prefecture.
The amount of damages Tepco needs to pay is not yet known but is expected to reach trillions of yen. Some financial institutions put the figure at ¥8 trillion to ¥11 trillion.
The cost of power generation per kilowatt hour...
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110629a2.html
The numbers used make it appear that the profits from the operation of 17 nuclear reactors over nearly 40 years are about 1/2 to 1/3 of the damages.
Japan has 54 reactors, or about 3X the number studied. Presuming their profits to be similar, that means the meltdowns have wiped out all profitability for the nuclear industry in Japan.
Not going into the incalculable nature of human suffering, I don't believe that the analysis takes into account future decommissioning costs and waste disposal either.
Originally posted at:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x302145
= new reply since forum marked as read