The real problkem here was that the government saw the taxi industry as a cash cow and simultaneously expanded the number of licences and auctioned them off.

Suddenly there was a lot more competition on the roads and of course incomes fell to the point where many regular and competent drivers sold up cutting their losses. That left only people willing to work at effectively minimum wage piece rates. Sunk costs forced many to simply keep trading.

That didn’t bother the state of course who would posture about “maintaining standards” while continuing to impose swingeing charges on everything and periodically allowing tariffs to increase as a sop — which merely accelerated the decline in patronage.

Oddly, when I started taxi driving and was inexperienced, in 1978 I was earning $5 per hour on an average night and when I left in 1993, the same. In 1987 an average night was $12 per hour.

sometimes less regulation is better regulation

Yes indeed, Terje, but sometimes less regulation isn’t. How much is the right amount and quality? That amount which most closely approaches the end sought by those on whose behalves the regulator acts, when the demanding group has standing to insist upon the ends in question.

I have been looking at the NEM 18 wind farm data and the weather maps, for Aug and Sept appears to be an improvement on the 11 wind farm data.

For rapidly doing so, maybe use CCGTs as replacement for their 20–30 year lifetimes. That’ll at least remove 60%, more as biomethane replaces natgas.

Internalisation Model B is pretty much what we do now. Yet except in extrem cases I don’t think this is optimal. Jailing people seems a big threat, but as per the above, few people are deterred by the prospect because they irrationally believe that “it won’t happen to me”. A person who disregards the serious possibility that driving at a blood alcohol level of .15 in medium traffic will make it likely he will suffer a serious collision with potentailly permanently debilitating consequences isn’t gouing to worry about three years in jail for killing someone on the footpath. So the kind of reasoning involved does not obtain, and all that can result is damage to innocents at one end and costs to the public at the other.

Deterrence depends for its effectiveness on perceived certainty of detection and perceived certainty of meaningful sanction in real time. Sanction delayed is less deterring. Thus, a system which meant drivers could be sure of being infringed every time they did it, even if the sanctions were comparatively low, is much more effective than one in which apparently improbable sanctions were severe. If we prevent people in real time from drink driving — e.g. requiring them to supply data to an onboard secure system with ID matching before starting the car, then they don’t get to act irrationally at all. There are already systems in cars that can cause them to slow to 25 kmh and these could be made to kick in when someone was more than say, 30 km/h over the relevant limit and fine them. Even the minute by minute meter on the costs of driving is a deterrent to driving and encourages car pooling.

So applying this principle to polluters, I’d do the same thing. We stop them doing the egregious stuff and charge them at pertinent rates for the sub-egregious stuff.

B) We ban speeding, drink driving and any other dangerous behaviours we can think of
and fine, jail, and otherwise sanction those who are caught.

I’m a great fan of B. Similarly, we could just draw up a globally binding timetable for
phasing out coal with sanctions for anybody caught in breach. This would serve to focus
the minds of energy companies in a way that nothing else could quite match.

CAN private (but gov’t subsidized) private contractors build good nukes? Of course. But it takes clear gov’t imposed regulations on how it is done so costs don’t spiral out of control and there is a *steady* and full time work force with some sort of N stamp-like certification at *every* level of construction.

Why regulations? Surely the key thing is well written contracts and good management oversight.

No, ‘experience’ is not considered, because few people have experience that are not working for EDF. Every one of the problems at Flamesville stems from non-EDF contractors who, by law, get the job based on being *licensed* and *low bidder*. Period. The group making some of the concrete forms were…wine barrel makers, I kid you not.

The last of the EdF engineers are getting ready to retire. They will not quit and go to work for these guys because of their pensions and other issues. Subcontracting is what essentially killed the Shorem plant in Long Island as costs spiraled out of control.

In fact, it’s not a bad comparison to use: US nuclear builds in the 1970s and the French ones. The US had no regulations on the *types* or reactors or who could build them outside of the N stamp for components. The French had a *highly efficient* socialized construction and design team that built their plants according to a *plan*, standardized the designs and used no subs at all. Wanna guess who did better?

The point about this is that the unions are, correctly and, understandably, fighting *further* privatization of EdF and part of their argument is around the issue of safety.

CAN private (but gov’t subsidized) private contractors build good nukes? Of course. But it takes clear gov’t imposed regulations on how it is done so costs don’t spiral out of control and there is a *steady* and full time work force with some sort of N stamp-like certification at *every* level of construction.

The two biggest unions are the CGT (France’s largest union and the one close to the French Communist Party) and the FO-CGT, which is closer to the Socialist Party politically, in case anyone wanted to know.

David

Secondly, on baseload. I only through this out there as one possible way to go with the technological limitation of existing Gen III and Gen III+ commercially available reactors. Obvisously a LFTR given it’s loading and scaling flexibility could literally handle 100% of any regions energy needs, is not on the table for the moment.

The issue is really replacing those base load coal plants. My plan for *anywhere* would *politically* target the coal burners. As a “thorium economy” advocate, I would be more than happy to see any national plan, in Australia or anywhere say “Ok, we have these 13,000 MWs of coal, we will start building Gen III reactors one at a time and when each plant goes COD, we pull the plug on the coal burner and bring out the bulldozers…”. That’s ALL I care about and why I got into being pro-nuclear. Even as “rock bottom” baseload, inclusive of coal, this would be a huge, *socially* significant advance over the non-policy that exists today in most countries.

David

As the ExternE report and others show, this is actually really high even BEFORE you add the climate change damage, and would already make coal (for instance) totally uncompetitive with nuclear.

For the benefit of all readers this link provides a summary of the external costs of electricity generation (in EUR).

http://lightbucket.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/the-external-costs-of-electricity-generation/

I suspect you are thinking too locally in your comments. To make genuine progress on cutting GHG it will have to be an international agreement, probably as part of an international trade agreement. Anything less will be about as useless as Kyoto.

Fran, you frequently talk about the political realities of convincing the Australian public to support nuclear energy. Step up a level and consider what it is going to take to get the public and governments of developing countries to accept higher priced energy NOW, for what to them is a possible benefit in a century from now. It simply will not fly in the real world.

An alternative to raising the price of FF (other than capturing the externalities costs, including the climate change damage costs) is to implement low-cost, low-emissions electricity generation. As I pointed out in post #61, I believe we could achieve that with nuclear in the time it takes to dispatch all the impediments against nuclear. Here are four examples that persuade me of this:

1. Refer to post #61 where I pointed out what had been achieved with nuclear 65 years ago.

2. We have the evidence of the NPPs built in the past 25 years posted on another thread by Nuclear Australia. This showed average build times around 4 years and less for GenIII.

3. China is building NPPs now at what they expect will be about $1400/kW. That is less than tghe cost of new coal fired generation in Australia. (It’s also just over half the cost per kW of the recent Australian wind farms and provides three times the energy output per kW, and provides it on demand, not just when the wind blows).

4. We have Russia building floating nuclear power stations to power aluminium smelters to sell aluminium on the international market. Those floating NPP’s are obviously expected to produce electricity at a cost competitive with the price the Australian aluminium smelters pay Australia’s cheapest coal fired power plants. These prices are the most deeply discounted long term contract prices available to anyone. The electricity price from the Russian floating NPPs is also competitive with the cheapest hydro power from Canada.

My conclusion is we can have low cost low emissions electricity. To achieve it we must educate the public to get ovder their irrational concerns about nuclear power. That to me is the answer. Then remove all the impediments to nuclear. Regulzate it on the same basis as all other industrial processes.

I question the concept of trying to make fossil fuels more expensive, other than by capturing all externalities and internalising them.

So do I. I do think though that if all of these costs were adequately internalised we would indeed have a figure that would make fossil fuels uneconomic in most settings, compared with other arrangements. Certainly, if there is uncertainty attaching to the precise impacts of AGW, then must should err, if an error is to be made on the high side rather than the low side. An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure. If we really don’t know what the economic benefit of rainforests or coral reefs or randomly moving ports or preventing IDPs is, then we should guess high.