Do anti nukes mention the cst loan guarantee when they go on about the nuke guarantee?

and do they analyze it? 8.3 billion for 2.2 GW is comparable to 1.37 billion for 400 MW except that the 400 is likely to be less reliable and ignore CF.

This is the Rush Limbaugh position. Right wing blogosphere stuff. Soundbytes to avoid thought.

But Okay: I’ll look at GapMinder if you look at Bellamy Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences. Or even former Reagan man, Kevin Phillips: Bad Money.

I’ll shut up now. I want to appeal to what you really know well.

The D of E has offered a 1.4 billion loan guarantee to a CST project designed to produce 400 MW of power. do you know what the capacity factor for this would be and how does the storage problem relate to capacity factor since of course any power source having to divert its power to storage will not be producing at nameplate.

When I am saddling a horse to put before a cart, it is true that the horse can be ready to go while the cart is still in unassembled bits and pieces.

But if I have no destination for the cart, or the destination is a swamp, the harness on the horse can be 150% state of the art, it doesn’t matter.

I repeat my usual uanswered query as to how you envisage the social engineering you favour. is China not a good model to follow?

I agree with your point about dropping the use of adjectives suchs as extreme etc. I accept the rebuke.

I do not agree with much that you say about equality. From my perception the GFC was largely caused as a result of state intervention to force Fanny May and the other big insurance firm to lend to people who could never pay back, combined with the fact that if a home owner doesn’t want to keep paying the morgage, they send the keys to the bank and say “your problem”. This was caused largely by bad government intervention to force lenders to lend to those who were a bad risk. Of course, there is much more to it, but this began after the Depression and Carter and Clinton made it worese instead of fixing it. Greenspan and Bush also got it seriously wrong.

There is little point us discussing this sort of thing because we are so far apart and it is a distration from what is important.

Regarding equality, I’d point you to GapMinder. I suggest it is also worth looking at the first two videos by Hans Rosling.

some think labor is the source of wealth (Locke, Ricardo and Marx thought this too despite their many differences); and you think entrepreneurs and investors are the source of wealth

Peter’s position on this makes no sense. Money only has meaning as an expression of the social labour people do. Absent that and it is as meaningful as currency in Monopoly

It is simply a medium that facilitates trade in labour power. An investor can invest only in stuff connected with people delivering goods and services, with assets accumulated from valuable goods and services, and when he or she does so, the cycle continues. The investor is a mere cipher in this not the creator of value.

He or she could argue that the discretion shown added in net terms to public goods, but in the end, whether the investor wins or loses, somebody benefits from that value and it becomes embedded in other production of public goods.

Peter should really stick to engineering.

The more we constrain business and investors the less there is for everyone, and the less there is to be spent on the commons. Our ideologies are so far apart it is difficult to find any common ground to a discussion on.

Peter: could we avoid terms like “extreme,” and “radical, extreme greenies?”

it’s empty name calling (sometimes names should be called). use of words like “extreme” and “extremist” have no content. either a position is reasonable or not (or both at once, often the case); true or false (or contradictory, most often the case).

rhetorically, words like “extreme” end up giving a pass to “the mainstream” and “the moderates,” who can’t be “extreme” because after all they’re “in the middle.”

so peter: in the united states, to be “in the middle,” and “not extreme” is to be unsure about global warming and probably opposed to the idea that humans evolved. To think global warming an urgent problem, to believe in evolution and to view barak obama as the furthest thing from a socialist–these three beliefs held at once would put one in the EXTREME MINORITY, even though they are all true.

Your view of business makes it sound like philanthropy. They provide for the public purse, they pay for everything we want from the commons, … they even feed us. they’re all Ebeneezer Scrooge’s after a good night’s sleep. Wait: my door bell is ringing–it’s a big turkey for our family dinner!!

I thought your philanthropists enclosed the commons and exploit the working class, whose labor is the source of wealth. In the U.S., the top one percent own nearly as much wealth as the bottom 95 %. Real unemployment is close to 20 % but the wealthy get bailed out (and pretty much have to get bailed out or the system will collapse–that’s how things are set up) and you’re telling Ewen to be grateful to them. why if not for them, we’d all be even poorer, is that it?

They don’t provide for those on the public purse: they GUTTED the pathetic “public purse” in the U.S. and have been doing it since the late seventies.

So there are disagreements: some think labor is the source of wealth (Locke, Ricardo and Marx thought this too despite their many differences); and you think entrepreneurs and investors are the source of wealth or perhaps they do all the thinking and working?

It’s hard for me to believe that you can be right on this topic: the businesspeople and investors have enormous power, and you want to give them more so they can continue to provide for us–food and cheap power.

if this story were true, you would think inequality and poverty would be much less than they are. But instead they are growing, and ordinary people grow more powerless by the day.

why is there so much inequality given the social power of business and investors? if they are providing so much for the ungrateful people?

That said: Peter, I read everything you write–especially on energy– and try hard to understand it. I think it’s incredibly important. In part, it is due to your arguments that I think (here comes a slogan): NUCLEAR MAKES CENTS.

It is business and investors that pay for everything we want from the commons.

And old myth. Actually, the public ultimately pays for everything. The investors are just middlemen.

If we don’t provide the coal or the paper, it will be provided by others.

Perhaps, but is this relevant? And is this certain? And do we know this would eb worse for humanity? It’s all guesswork. We can only control what is within our power. Second guessing without clear modelling is pointless.

We cannot “sequester (until innocuous) from the commons every emission or waste product” forever.

Precisely why the costs and damage must be monetised and internalised. In the case of nuclear, this is done.

Some who advocate this sort of position don’t seem to recognise that the noxious chemicals last forever

No, they don’t or they can be secured.

It is clear that your sympathies lie with securing the privileges of the elite. That’s fair enough, but you should stop hiding behind cliched slogans. This has nothing to do with energy policy and everything to do with your cultural agenda.

And personally, if every form of energy and every producer of goods and services were required to sequester (until innocuous) from the commons every emission or waste product for which there was good evidence of harm to the commons, I’d be totally relaxed about not imposing charges on emissions.

I’d want a robust system for ensuring that would happen in perpetuity of course.

This is an example of an extreme position that I find off-putting. It is impossible to achieve. It would require shutting down mining. We cannot “sequester (until innocuous) from the commons every emission or waste product” forever. Similarly for uranium, iron and all ores. So we’d have no electricity. We couldn’t build wind turbines or solar panels either. Some who advocate this sort of position don’t seem to recognise that the noxious chemicals last forever, unlike nuclear wastes which have a half life.

The benefits of low cost electrcity must be balanced against the damages.

You say your main interest is in what is right for the commons. In previous comments you haves scoffed at business and investors.

I suggest that those who are interested in what is good for the commons need to think first about what is good for business and investors. It is business and investors that pay for everything we want from the commons. They pay for all our capital works and all those people on the public purse. The feed us and provide our energy.

The more we constrain business and investors the less there is for everyone, and the less there is to be spent on the commons.

Our ideologies are so far apart it is difficult to find any common ground to a discussion on.

Something that has been under discussion on this web site is whether we should constrain the sale of coal. I’d put the Tasmanian pulp mill in the same type of issue. Some people think we can control the world market for products and resources such as coal and paper (from the pulp mill). We cannot. If we don’t provide the coal or the paper, it will be provided by others. In the case of paper, the mill will be built in another country, and probably with worse environmental for the world that if built in Australia. So we reduce our income and reduce what we have to spend on the commons in Australia for no net benefit for the world at large.

I do not have a much time for the narrow, simplistic agendas of the radical, extremist greenies.

It will take at least 10 years to:

1. Set up the regulatory framework

2. Set up an organisation to manage the implementation of the initial fleet of power stations (I see something like a modern version of the Snowy Mountains Authority)

3. Set up the education facilities we need (eg nuclear engineering facilities in each mainland state Capital)

4. Got through the procurement process – at least 4 years, probably longer – to award of the firsdt contract

5. Construction to commissioning – 5 years would be optimistice for the first one, based on current experience although we can expect that to improve over the next decade.

Note, some of these can be done in parallel, if sufficient authority is delegated to the ‘Nuclear Energy Implementation Authority” to get on with the job (similar to the authority given to Sir William Hudson to build the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

Give the job to an engineer, get the politicians and the greenee activists out of the way, and it can be done.

Unfortunately, I don’t sorry. That is the topic I’ve been trying to start a discussion on. However, most contributors seem to be stuck on wanting to increase the cost of electricity.

We are close. I don’t believe in any ETS or Carbon tax at this stage. If there was an international ETS, administered by the World Trade Organisation as part of the GATT, and it was no more subject to fraud or cheating than anyother traded comodity I would support that. However, that is clearly impossible to achieve, ever. Because, we will never be able to measure CO2 emissions and do the accounting of them nearly as well as we can for other traded comodities like iron, oil, wheat, etc. In fact, we’ll never be able to measure and account for CO2 emissions as well as we can account for uranium, and Jim Green and his mates are not satisfied with that accounting. So what hope for CO2? I suspect it will never happen.

Furthermore, implementing ETS or C tax shifts the focus from the real solution. People think ETS or Carbon tax is going to solve climate change. What a joke that is. It is totally naieve.

While we are distracted by ETS and Carbon tax, we are not focused on what we need to do to remove the imposts on nuclear. If we mremove the regulatory imposts, and then give the engineer s the goal “give us nuclear generation at lower cost than coal” and let them at it, I am convinced they will achieve that goal.

I’m a but hesitant in going as far as loan guarantees but if that is necessary to deal with regime risk then I do see the merit. However not all of the construction risk relates to regime risk.

I am too, in principle. However, we have distorted the market by such an enormous amount and have done so for 40+ years, that we cannot unwind the perception of the investment risk without a major involvement of government.

I agree not all the construction risk is relates to regime risk, but that is to be handled in the negotiations and the contract. It certainly does take longer to build nuclear plant in a county that has not built them recently, and that is a fault of the regime, not the contractor. So that cost burden should be carried by the regime. In short, the investment risk premium and the First of a Kind cost premiums should be carries by the regime if we want clean cheap power. That is no different to the argument the renewable advocates have been running for decades to support government funding of their renewable energy generators.