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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (353291)	10/2/2007 11:44:34 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575446

Tim, With nuclear the initial construction costs and the cost of all the political and regulatory battles you have to fight (both direct costs, and the cost of the time delay), often makes it more expensive in terms of total cost per megawatt hour over its life time than say coal, even with the fuel cost of coal. Nuclear plants are very much like semiconductor fabs (if you borrow money to build them). They better get built very quickly, and start operating right away, so that they can pay back the interest. Delays are disasters. Not only because there are additional costs during the delays, there is no revenue stream and interest expense to pay. The problem with past regulatory oversight was that there were 2 (main) permits required: - first to build, to begin construction - second to get operating license. So the investors would put up the money to begin construction, only to be left hanging at the second stage, getting license to operate. The Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island got stuck at second stage (after numerous delays building), and in the end, the activists together with pandering politicians managed to torpedo the application to get operating license. Anyway, one of the main changes that current administration made to the approval process was that the 2 permits were merged into one, and when a utility (or an investor) successfully obtains the the permit, it is simultaneously a permit to build and to operate. Ths shortens the time to market, or time to revenue, and greatly reduces the risk. Which is why suddenly there are 30 applications to build nuclear power palants after 30 years of building virtually none. So anyway, as long as the time from beginning of construction to operation is reasonably short, nothing really comes close to overall cost of nuclear power. Well, hydro probably does, but that is already tapped out. I was considering just coal, gas, oil, solar and nuclear. OTOH the political climate might be improving, and some new designs might be both safer and cheaper. Another thing is that the newer designs are able to extract more energy out of uranium, leaving nuclear waste much easier to store. Also, we may get to the point when newest nuclear reactors can reprocess old nuclear waste, use it as fuel. Also costs for fuels is presumably going to go up if we continue to rely on them. We have a lot of coal but it isn't a limitless resource. Well, it isn't limitless, but it is it gives more than enough time it needs before we switch to fusion. I have seen estimates of about 100 year supply, which is not really a fixed figure. It is ~100 years at stable pricing. If prices go higher, additiona supply becomes economical to mine. Also, most uranium is produced in stable, friendly nations (Canada and Australia) And then if anything like a carbon tax is ever introduced than it greatly benefits nuclear vs. coal. Surely does. I posted my idea here: Message 23810990 which is a tax electricity produced from oil, gas and coal, going from 0% to 50% over 25 years with 2% increments. I think it would have minimal economic impact. In early yeats, tax would be too low to matter, in later years, there would be little electricity generated from those sources left in production. But it would certainly change the incentives against building new power plants using CO2 producing fossil fuels. Useful life of a coal plant (most CO2 producing) is 40 years. Would anybody in their right mind start building one today, if they knew that the last 15 years, the plant would be paying 50% tax, while competing against lower cost producers with nuclear plants? Joe