By the time you add in decommissioning costs, and a state funded radioactive waste storage facility, nuclear can never really win the debate
Against fossil fuels, and probably hydro power and a few other things probably not.
But when you consider the down time for most alternatives (that they produce less total electricity if they are not producing as often, but esp. that they can't be relied on to produce when you need it) nuclear can probably against many "alternate energy" sources, esp. with some regulatory reform and with improved designs.
Wind, although intermittent, costs $1,300 a kilowatt. Flow batteries for storing wind power sell for $4,000 a kilowatt. Compressed air can cost $1,000 per kilowatt. Conceivably, wind and storage together hover just under the $6,000 kilowatt benchmark for nuclear.
Cost per kw isn't a very important concern. Cost per kilowatt hour is far more important for generation.
Assuming the lowest price alternate options listed $1300/kw for wind, and then $100 per kw for backup power for the wind. If the wind farm has a capacity factor of 25%, then the costs to get enough energy to equal the kw/h of a continuous kw of production would be about $5200. Then you need to add backup capacity to cover the down times, and the times when the winder energy is under-producing. As with production we really need a cost per kw/h, not kilowatt.
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For every $700 it pays for a compressed air system, the utility gets 1 kilowatt of electricity, supplied for more than 20 hours, enough to run one coffee maker all day [source: EAC, NSTAR]. Pumped hydroelectric costs more -- $2,250 per kilowatt.
For power that lasts minutes to hours, lithium-ion batteries cost $1,100 per kilowatt (or coffee maker), flywheels cost $1,250 per kilowatt, flow batteries cost $2,500 per kilowatt, and high-temperature batteries like sodium-sulfur cost $3,100 per kilowatt [source: EAC]. And storage in supercapacitors costs even more.
science.howstuffworks.com
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OK so $700 for 1 kw for 20 hours (that's actually a lower per kw cost than your figure but your figure doesn't specify how many hours). So its 20 kw/h for $700 or $20 per kilowatt-hour. How many kw/h per kilowatt of total production will you need to store? I'm not highly confident of any specific answer, but if you want to make sure that you can continually get electricity from just wind, I would say quite a lot. You could include capacity from other sources and reduce the amount of backup storage needed, but to the extent your paying for other capacity you start blowing away the argument for wind over nuclear because now your paying for wind, and fossil fuel backup, increasing the cost and increasing pollution.
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Here is some data from the Department of Energy, wind and solar don't come off particuarly well, and that's before considering storage costs, costs to back up these sources with other types of generation, or the cost of an unreliable electricity supply (and you would have to pay at least one of these three categories of costs)
 eia.doe.gov
And from the UK
UK energy costs for different generation technologies (2010) Technology? Cost range (£/MWh)?
New nuclear 55-85
Onshore wind 80-110
Biomass 60-120
Natural gas turbines with CO2 capture 60-130
Coal with CO2 capture 100-155
Offshore wind 150-210
Natural gas turbine, no CO2 capture 55-110
Tidal power 155-390
en.wikipedia.org
And from the California Energy Commission
California Energy Commission
California levelized energy costs for different generation technologies (2007) Technology Cost (USD/MWh)
Advanced Nuclear 067 67
Coal 074 74-88
Gas 313 313-346
Geothermal 067 67
Hydro power 048 48-86
Wind power 060 60
Solar 116 116-312
Biomass 047 47-117
Fuel Cell 086 86-111
Wave Power 611 611
Note that the above figures incorporate tax breaks for the various forms of power plants. Subsidies range from 0% (for Coal) to 14% (for nuclear) to over 100% (for solar).
So that's including the tax breaks in the calculation, and the tax breaks are bigger per MWh for alternatives than for fossil fuels (except "clean coal"), or nuclear so the real cost would tilt even more towards nuclear (or even more so towards fossil fuels and hydro power, the gas costs are high, but its used for peaking power, cost per kw/hour would be lower (but still higher than other fossil fuel sources) if it was used for base power, also peaking power is worth more per kwh or mwh.
Its no 100% clear that the cost for nuclear includes waste disposal. It might, but lets assume it doesn't.
"The disposal of low level waste reportedly costs around £2,000/m³ in the UK. High level waste costs somewhere between £67,000/m³ and £201,000/m³.[28] General division is 80%/20% of low level/high level waste,[29] and one reactor produces roughly 12 m³ of high level waste annually."
en.wikipedia.org
$286K per plant per year. On the low end.
Taking the high end estimate for the cost of high level waste it would be £2000*.8*12 + £201000*.2*12 for a total of around a half million pounds or close to eight hundred thousand dollars per plant per year. The reality would presumably be lower since the high level waste includes different types with costs as low as a third of that figure, but its probably reasonable to plug in the highest figure and I've done so.
If the useful life of the plant is 30 years, that's an additional $24 million for waste disposal for that plant. Not a very important factor. With 90 percent capacity utilization and a gigawatt of capacity (and nuclear plants can easily exceed both figures), the plant would produce for over 236,000 hours. Lets round that down to 200K to be conservative. So you have 200 thousand gigawatt hours, or 200 million megawatt hours. Rounding the disposal cost up to $25million, and then doubleing it to provide a large fudge factor, and you get 25 cents extra cost per megawatt hour, which doesn't make much of a difference in comparison to other electricity sources.
You could save some on the wind by not providing backup, but then its just not reliable. It can produce base power since it doesn't produce much of the time. It can't produce peaking power since it can't be relied on when you need it, and it doesn't fit the function of load following power either. Without some form of storage, it doesn't make a lot of sense as a major contributor. With storage the total costs per kw/h will be higher than they are for nuclear. |
