To: Krowbar who wrote (46991 ) 7/25/1999 5:12:00 AM From: nihil Read Replies (1) | Respond to
TSC (total system cost) is hard to measure. As an economist, I always preferred to measure it in dollars. The engineers usually preferred a separate Btu cost. Some of the things we found 20 years ago was that DOE was pricing enriched uranium fuel cheap because they were using very cheap federally subsidized TVA coal power to run the enrichment plants at Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth. If uranium had been priced at incremental cost, fully burdened with taxes, interest, etc. few nuclear plants could ever have broken-even just on the fuel cycle. Of course, the insurance guarantee was necessary. No power company could ever have afforded to build a nuclear plant unless they were allowed to charge their customers for construction work in progress in the rate base. It was obvious that new energy plants should be natural gas until that was gone and then move to low-sulfur coal until that was gone, then to a high sulfur coal with emissions control. Nuclear and fusion research should be continued but only introduced when environmental problems were clear enough to require action to reduce CO2 emissions.
