But that aside, I completely agree we will need more energy not less in the future, and am being steadily persuaded as I go through Tom’s book.

With 2-axis tracking almost maximum capacity is obtained from about 10 am to 5 pm. Between those times it should operate at about 85-100% of capacity. The only factor attenuating light falling on the receiver is the greater amount of atmosphere it needs to pass through when the sun is closer to the horizon. A graph for direct beam sunlight should be considered, not sunlight falling on a fixed panel.

I do think that the costs of new nuclear power in the United States have been increased by government subsidies. So I looked up the price of electricity from the new French reactor in Flamanville, which has been under construction for 15 months. Originally electricity from the plant was costed at 8.44 Australian cents per kilowatt-hour. However, now it is estimated to cost 10.8 Australian cents per kilowatt-hour, so it is not just the US which is having difficulty producing new low cost nuclear power at the moment.

Yes, what I see wrong with your estimate is that you insist on using what I’ve gladly admitted is a broken regulatory/corporate/government system and implying that it represents the necessary future of nuclear power. I point to nuclear plants built within the last decade that cost about an eighth of what Cloncurry is projected to cost if Cloncurry operates at a 25% capacity factor, which is better than any solar plant of any kind has yet managed, even without storage. To pretend that it can achieve 31%—with the energy penalties of storage, no less—is a far stretch of optimism. Remember, capacity factor isn’t how many hours it can produce power. It’s how many kWh it can produce over time.

I’ve often described how broken the US system is when it comes to nuclear power, and how that has to be fixed so as not to throw away billions of dollars when we start building nuclear again. What I have pointed out is that the most recent (and thus most germane to our discussion) experience of plants already built, both solar and nuclear, indicate that nuclear is far cheaper per kWh of electricity produced. If you take the best-case scenario of solar as yet unbuilt and the worst-case scenario of nuclear plants as yet unbuilt and compare them to make your point that solar is better, while ignoring solar and nuclear plants that are actually built and producing that prove the opposite with hard data, then you may convince some people who really want to believe, but I’m sorry, you won’t convince me.

Power companies in general haven’t used the power storage methods suggested for wind and thermal solar because they have mostly used fossil fuels and their energy comes pre-stored in the form of coal, oil and gas. As for putting over capacity to good use, if you can’t sell electricity at a price that covers your costs it means that there are other goods that people prefer over electricity. Overbuilding reactors will cause whoever does it, whether private companies or government, to lose billions of dollars. That’s billions of dollars that could have been spent on healthcare, feeding the hungry, scientific research, low emission cars or Playstations.

As for basing discussions on economics, there is no point in building reactors in Australia if other low emission alternatives, such as wind, are cheaper. Why bother having long discussions on safety or proliferation if reactors aren’t going to be built on economic grounds?

I’m interested to know if you think there is anything wrong with my calculation that shows new solar that hasn’t been completed yet will be cheaper in Australia than new nuclear in the US that hasn’t been completed yet.

You predict that new reactors will be cheaper than alternatives in the future, but I’m afraid I don’t understand why. Currently reactors under construction are very expensive. While some of their current cost is probably due to temporary factors, nuclear was not economical in Australia prior to this. We had two rounds of tenders for a nuclear plant at Jervis Bay but none of the proposals were considered worthwhile, and as far as I’m aware no one has offered to compete in the Australian electricity market with nuclear since then. While I think nuclear costs can come down, I don’t think costs will drop low enough to become competitive. Large amounts of money are spent on nuclear research every year, Japan alone spends about $6.7 billion a year on nuclear research, but this has not succeeded in significant cost reductions. Commercial nuclear energy is a mature technology that has been around for over fifty years. Mature technologies generally don’t reduce in cost by more that 1% a year. Wind power has declined in cost on average by over 3% a year for the last quarter century and appears likely to continue to decrease in cost. The cost of solar power is dropping by roughly 5% a year. It seems unlikely to me that nuclear will be able to compete. Even if GE could build a nuclear plant that produces electricity at 4.6 US cents per kilowatt-hour in Australia, at current average cost decreases it would only take about two years for wind to become cheaper.

What is the harm in building an Integral Fast Reactor? The cost, mainly. Current nuclear power is not competitive in Australia and designing and building a new kind of commercial reactor will cost a lot of money. This is money that could be spent reducing greenhouse gas emission by other means. If an IFR cost as much as the new Finnish reactor, then for the same price Australia could afford to install wind turbines with an average output of over two gigawatts. And I don’t understand why there are any significant advantages to building IFRs. Steel and concrete is less than 1% the cost of a nuclear plant so reducing the amount required is not of large benefit, and fuel and waste storage are not a large part of the cost of nuclear power so even they were eliminated it would only reduce the cost of nuclear power by about 7%. Wind and solar currently drop in price by about that much or more every two years. And while I certainly don’t expect wind and solar to continue to rapidly drop in price indefinitely, I do expect it to continue for some time.

Of course, if a private company wants to go ahead and spend their own money to build and Integral Fast Reactor and compete with other low emission alternatives, then good luck to them. But I would not invest in such a company as I doubt they will be able to compete.

I agree that we’re in dire straits. That’s why I, like so many others, am trying to come up with workable solutions.

The problem as I see it is that human kind has lost control over its own destiny, because we have gone over the tipping point. It could be that the only remedies available to us now can also lead to our demise, but we have to consider them all the same because not to do spells a fatal prognosis. Some potent drugs are in that category. They can kill the patient, but the patient will die without it.

I think many people think we still have time to pull away from the brink. Maybe naively, but I admire their optimism. I would like to share it.

But if they are correct, then now is not the time to suffer a failure of nerve. And that’s where the caution lies.

All sorts of madcap, desperate ventures will be put forward as the planetary condition worsens. And many of them will make matters worse, simply because they try to resolve a problem through escalation. As potable water supplies dry up we build power-hungry desalination plants to keep up with growing water demand… and so forth.

Escalatory strategies run counter to de-escalatory strategies.

Yet, like scurrying ants on a burning log, we feel like we have no choice but to take desperate measures as the log gets intolerably hot under our feet.

Since you mentioned overbuilt capacity, I’d just like to make a couple comments. Any way you cut it, electrical capacity will be overbuilt to some extent, and until storage systems are up and running and efficient and economical, it will be to a fairly large extent, for electricity use is extremely variable. Which begs the question of why utility companies haven’t yet built energy storage systems like those being proposed for wind and solar, rather than building more power plants. But as long as we can put the overcapacity to good use (desalination, electrolysis, etc) I don’t see the issue if the power plants are reasonably economical to build and don’t contribute any GHGs to the atmosphere.

After weeks of lengthy exchanges on Barry’s board here (which I really appreciate as a forum for discussions like this), I find myself wishing that wind and solar proponents would lighten up on the competition attitude. I don’t see Barry or I or anybody else who believes we should build some safe nuclear power plants saying that we shouldn’t build wind and solar projects. But from the other direction there’s this frequent air of desperation and antagonism, often accompanied by, frankly, some pretty lame arguments against nuclear power. Why is that? In general I don’t see people arguing much (at least on this board) on a safety or proliferation basis, but almost always on an economic basis. Yet the data that’s available on the most recent actual built and operating projects for both nuclear and solar certainly seems to favor nuclear by a wide margin. Is that what all the sturm und drang is about? I’m perfectly willing to just build a single IFR to see if it turns out to be as economically unfeasible as its critics claim. Where would be the harm in that approach? What’s all the fuss about? One would almost think that someone’s afraid of actual data.

Having long been researching all this, here’s my prediction: IFRs will in fact be very economical to build, and will use far less construction materials per megawatt compared to wind or solar. They will also be able to provide power 24/7 and thus have a tremendous advantage in that regard. In terms of life cycle GHG emissions as well as economics and reliability, IFRs will be the superior choice, complete with free fuel for hundreds of years. Will I be proven wrong? Let’s find out. Let’s build one and compare it to the upcoming wind and solar projects, and let the chips fall where they may. I’m fine with that.

If these figures prove correct once it’s operated, this would be a $31M venture resulting in a plant with a 10MW nameplate and an average capacity of 35% with thermal storage, based on the estimate of 30 GWh/year. Which is, as you say, power at about 11c/KWh. I’ll be interested to see how the project develops — let’s check back when it’s been running for a year. These sort of demo projects are certainly exactly what is required to get a better handle on these numbers — whether for new renewable or new nuclear projects. Same deal.

A point not explored much on this blog so far is how costs change when CSP and wind become a large fraction of the grid — molten salt or block graphite heat storage really helps with this, but still leaves problematic gaps (e.g., during cloudy winter days, especially strings of them).

If GE can produce nuclear power at 4.6 US cents per kilowatt-hour all costs included, then that might be just profitable in South Australia where the average wholesale price of electricity was 4.84 US cents a kilowatt-hour in 2007. Since reactors are generally large, bringing one online in Australia will tend to push baseload market prices down, so I don’t know if a reactor would be profitable at that price. I also expect that GE would face increased risks and costs building in Australia, but if they want to take the risk and build a reactor here, we should let them.

Where do you get these numbers? Paid-off nuclear plants in the USA produce electricity for 1.68 cent/kWh. GE says they can produce it for 4.6 cents from complete ground-up IFRs, all costs in including interest. That’s a far cry from your number.

Chris, I’ve tried to get through to Monbiot but he’s not answering me. Don’t know why.