Clearly we’ll have a lot firmer ground to stand on once a couple of the newest Gen III+ plants have been up and running for a couple years and their successors are starting to be mass-produced. Until then any of our figures will be a bit hazy, though not so much that we can’t make some pretty good guesses.

We do not know the single most significant aspect of this plants finances: the discount price for the money to build the plants. We find that out and we will have a better shot at figuring out the costs over the lifetime of the plant based on a standard 10 to 20 years amortized loan.

DW

In 2004 I already convinced myself that manufacture of ammonia from water and air, carried out by a 500 MWe (or bigger) chemo-nuclear power plant , should be commercially viable (see my book “The Nuclear Imperative”). Whether it is practical for small-scale wind- and solar-energy storage is questionable. But like Tom says, given that fuzz-head politicians are going to throw money at building some gigawatt wind and solar monstrosities in our prairies (economics and eco-system destruction be damned !), one might consider making on-site electrolytic hydrogen. On-site Haber-Bosch conversion to ammonia might also be thrown in if money is no object. I wonder how that would compare with pumping water to an elevated storage basin and retrieving the energy by hydroelectric turbines when needed, as has been proposed.

I understand you mentioned trucking or piping the hydrogen to remote Ammonia plants, nevertheless, it still does not solve the problem with feedstock flow as I outlined in my previous comment. The hydrogen output would be still variable according to power availability even if you would truck it or pipe it from wind farm production site.
Transport by truck requires high hydrogen compression or liquefaction, both requiring large amount of energy to accomplish. Hydrogen does not store well because of it’s low density. It occupies a lot of space, even in liquid state.
Economics of this whole scheme does not fit any practical portfolio of private enterprise.
As a matter of fact we looked into trucking hydrogen for our used vegetable oil hydrogenation plant to diesel fuel. It turned out that cost of hydrogen delivered by truck was nearly twice as expensive per energy unit as the selling price of diesel fuel. Adding a storage vessel on site increased the cost projection into extreme expense. Safety regulations for storing hydrogen are driving the cost even higher. Our solution was to install skid mounted natural gas reformer right on site. Such small reformers are now commercially available from Haldor Topsoe, Prax Air, Air Liquide and other suppliers. Hence, once again, we are forced down to practical level and use natural gas.
If we could buy nuclear generated electricity for 2 cents/kwh and get water electrolyzer for a reasonable price it would be economic to use water electrolyses for our process, especially if byproduct Oxygen could be sold. In practical world neither exists for affordable price.
Hydrogen generation from alternate energy is very impractical from technical and economic point of view. Of course it could be done if mega money is thrown at it but the economics will remain bad.
Economics of solar/wind power is very bad. It prompted United Arab Emirate (UAE) to go nuclear. Four reactor contract was just awarded to South Korean Consortium. Despite having one of the best conditions for solar power, UAE decided to use nuclear power instead because of much better economics and power availability for industries they are planning. When all considered, this is the best decision how to invest national financial resources and get things done.
By the way, the electricity production cost of these 4 reactors will be about 1.6cents/kwh when 40 billion is spread over 60 years and 90% power plant availability factor. I calculate $20 billion for construction cost and $20 billion for operation for 60 year period, no interest on finances is counted into calculation. This is what I call economics! It makes alternate energy cost look very sick in comparison.

Nuclear, however, is a whole other matter. That’s what really represents the threat to the oil and gas (and coal, of course) status quo. That’s why it’s so frustrating to have to fight environmental groups and wind and solar advocates over nuclear power, since they represent just the first wave of resistance to a global nuclear power deployment that has any hope of overturning the dominant energy sources. It’s doubly ironic in that those same groups are so antagonistic toward the fossil fuel interests, yet by resisting the deployment of nuclear power they are playing into their hands in a truly Faustian bargain that is rarely acknowledged or even recognized. This irony is probably nowhere as clearly and ludicrously demonstrated as in the case of T. Boone Pickens, which is why I pointed it out in the article.

There are huge pressures in the market for ever-increasing use of oil & natural gas. Once oil has been crowned the king of our energy supply, political infrastructure has been established to exert controls on oil supply and thereby draw various geopolitical and economic favours. Any decrease in the use of oil will destabilize this infrastructure and make it useless. So any such effort to reduce oil consumption will be resisted fiercely..

Oil prices have a direct bearing on the commodity prices (as we’ve discovered once again last year during the oil crisis). These oil prices are dictated not only by supply and demand, but also by the critical relation they have with the strength of the US dollar. The international oil bourses located in London and New York always quote the oil prices in US dollars. All international oil exports are conducted through these bourses. If the value of the US dollar falls down, for example, through overspending by the US government or by spiralling debt (which may happen due to warfare activity, such as in Iraq), the oil prices automatically go up.. This relationship between oil and dollar is highly useful for the US government, as it acts as a lever which restores the strength of the US dollar against other currencies in the global market. The oil shocks are suffered by all the world, not just the US.. As long as any country needs oil exports, US retains the ultimate say over its trade and political ambitions. Retaining control on how the oil & natural gas exports are done between different countries is the most important element of US foreign policy. This control can be about handwringing oil-exporter countries (OPEC), or on military policing over natural gas pipelines etc..

Thus, oil is a crucial channel through which global geopolitics are conducted. Any reduction in oil consumption would make this geopolitical control less useful. This is the reason why oil & natural gas lobbyists have percolated so efficiently inside all political parties of the USA. Whether any politician argues for right-wing or left-wing, the ball shall ultimately remain in the oil & natural guys’ court !

Any technology will be tolerated as long as it doesn’t damage the pre-eminence enjoyed by oil and natural gas. It is true whether that technology be coal, nuclear, wind, solar etc.. What Tom has mentioned in this article is about using wind to reduce natural gas consumption. Fat chance of that happening with the current political establishment.

What do I find most interesting about this? Easy. The UAE chose to build 4 x APR-1400 reactors rather than 220+ Andasol-1 solar thermal power plants. If nuclear were so uneconomic, and solar thermal such an obvious choice, I wonder why that would be? It’s not as though the UAE lacks the solar resource — there is a hot desert right on their doorstep, unlike most nations (so long transmissions lines are less of a concern). To me, this speaks volumes about the relative economic uncompetitiveness of unsubsidised renewables. Welcome to the real world.

Careful, DW. You’re getting perilously close there to the truth that dare not speak its name: That if we build enough NPPs to provide 100% backup for intermittent renewables, then they’ll be only an expensive redundancy.

And that’s quite a price disparity that Jade and John are talking about. Judging by China’s price targets, it sounds like the UAE’s not exactly getting a great deal, in either case.

http://djysrv.blogspot.com/
http://www.theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/
http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/
http://davidwalters.dailykos.com

David
PS…the deal itself was $20bn. The UAE intends to spend a total of $40bn on new NNPs.

SInce I believe the UAE is already a gas exporter and uses gas for desalination perhaps the Aussie politicians should tell them where they’ve gone wrong.

Nuclear can handle load changing. It depends on what kind of load changing: dispatchable load changing, emergency peaking load, scheduled 10 minute, hourly and 24 hour load changing, load following, etc. etc. There are a variety.

Right now, only because of the deals cut to deploy nuclear is is “based load”, in this case meaning the opposite of ‘base load’, that is, they are paid to run flat out. They can be paid *not* be run flat out as well, as the French regularly do with their Gen II units. It’s more a function of the financing.

I advocate the flexible scheduling of future new NPPs in the U.S. where they can be paid for ancillary services such as load changing. The revenue garnared from nuclear is enough to allow such flexibility.

CCGTs are not paid for only when the run. Depending on the contract, they are all paid NOT TO RUN, or, rather, paid to be on stand by.

DW

… Water vapor and ammonia on metals react to produce nitric acid …

How would that go?

   x H2O + y NH3 + Fe —> ???

(How fire can be domesticated)