The True Cost of Electric Power
I urge readers to go through this excellent article explaining the costs of various means of generating electrical power. This is a wonderful presentation of the most important ingredients in the calculus that we would like to think our leaders employ in establishing public energy policy.
To present a few of the basics on electric power:
- The availability of renewables fluctuates during each 24-hour cycle, and thus it’s normally assumed that they are inappropriate for providing baseload power.
- The cost of building the plant is independent of the cost of the fuel to operate the plant.
- Where solar and wind can be switched on and off in seconds, fossil fuel and nuclear plants cannot.
- The cost of pollution needs to be included in the calculations.
While I don’t dispute any of this, there are important aspects of the discussion that I feel need to be brought forward:
• The reason that we believe renewables cannnot provide baseload power is not intrinsic to the generation method per se, but to our perceived inablility to store energy inexpensively. However, molten salt technology, which stores energy as heat and coverts it to electricity on demand, is a proven method of removing this objection. I urge readers to note the work of Ausra, the US leading solar thermal company, based in Northern California. Yesterday, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. David Mills, the company’s founder, in preparation for my book on renewables.
• The actual cost of building these plants is almost never anywhere near the projected budget. Readers may want to Google “nuclear plant cost overrun,” and read a few of the 54,700 articles they’ll find on the subject. Here’s one that refers to a certain nuclear project as “satanic,” based on the actual amount of the overrun ($6.66 billion). The Florida utility, FPL Group, now estimates the cost of building a new nuclear power plant at over $9 billion, nearly double their previous estimate.
• The nuclear industry and its lobbies have carefully confused us about the costs and safety of shipping and storing nuclear waste, which remains dangerous for as long as one million years.
• As noted, the author of the article above mentions the cost of the pollution, but does not suggest any real way of quantifying it. While I’ll grant that this is not a straightforward issue, it’s really crux of the matter.
As I’ve written many times in the past, if the price we pay per kilowatt-hour of electricity (or for a gallon of gasoline) included the cost of addressing the lung disease and long-term environmental damage to our skies and oceans, the math would be changed completely. Society’s desire to continue to mine, process, ship and burn coal and oil would be gone in the blink of an eye.
Craig: Good point, nuclear is also very slow to implement these days. The fuel is also insufficient to run the exisiting fleet until mid century unless one invokes the Plutonium Cycle. The latter is at odds with the Obama disarmament initiative.
David (Dr. David Mills, Founder, Ausra)
Thanks, David. Just one more point (of which there are dozens) that makes nuclear such a terrible option.
Although it’s certainly true that the presently used pressurized water reactors have problems that make them unacceptable, that fact should not be used to condemn nuclear power. There are many possible reactor designs that would be acceptable.
The reactors commonly in use now use only about 1% of the available energy in the uranium fuel, and the waste is dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. However, there are reactor designs that use fuel more efficiently and could even burn the existing waste. Those reactors generate only a tiny amount of waste compared with currently used reactors, and the generated waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years.
Again, although the reactors commonly used now are unacceptable for several reasons, reactors can be build which completely eliminate those problems.
The case for conventional nuclear is even worse than stated.
Frank, I took the liberty of viewing the website you referred in a previous comment (on thorium reactors). On that site (and I have no reason to doubt their figures) they stated that a heavy water reactor (such as those we use here in Canada) the fuel use is about 0.75%, and for light water reactors (such as those in the U.S. and elsewhere) it is about 0.5%. Given a thermal efficiency (for conversion into electricity by steam turbine generators) of around 30% to 40%, the actual energy delivery rate is around 0.2% to 0.25% of the fuel energy, not counting grid transmission losses.
This isn’t all- we still have not addressed the (mostly fossil-fuelled) energy expended in extracting and processing the fuel. The very best uranium mining sites (which are fast disappearing) contain uranium in a concentration of 0.2% or less, meaning that we have to grind up half a kilogram of rock to get a gram of uranium. Further losses and energy expenditures (not to mention the use of toxic chemicals) can be expected in turning this into yellowcake and then processing into fuel rods. To my mind, this is a pretty dismal scenario, which will become ten times worse when we have to mine sites containing less than 0.02% uranium concentrations.
While thorium plants would theoretically have some important advantages (such as use of a more plentiful fuel, virtually 100% fuel use, no need for extensive fuel processing, stable operation and self-shutdown capability (the Japanese nuclear plant explosion was not caused by the earthquake itself, but by the tsunami’s destruction of the backup generators needed to shut down the plant, thus leading to thermal runaway)), and a working model of a thorium plant existed when the industry decided to go with uranium, no one has yet built and tested a utility-scale thorium plant, so we do not know what other problems might occurr. Most investors have been scared off of nuclear these days, rightly or wrongly. My opinion is that we should never build another conventional nuclear plant (in fact, we should be phasing them out as soon as we rid ourselves of coal-fired plants), and as for thorium, I question whether we really need it.
Thanks for addressing this.
The real costs of all consumption are easily determined: just add up all of the government budgets (state, local, federal) plus the sales taxes, the road taxes, the fees and licenses, etc.
You see, the reason we have government is because we consume things outside what we produce ourselves. Very little of government is not directly related to protecting our ‘stuff’ and our ability to get more ‘stuff’.
Ergo, instead of trying to calculate the ‘pollution expenses’ of things, simply use the cost of government which provides protection, health care, cleanup, wars to get stuff, etc. Put that cost where everyone can see it when they make consumption decisions: at the cash register or on the bill for their electricity.
That amount is currently close to 50% of our income. No need for ‘cap and trade’ or other complicated measures.
You assume that “molten” salt is universally available over the entire power grid?
Get real!
There are many good points made in the article and in Craig’s points above. However, I find it amusing that very little is made of energy storage after generation. We actually do it all the time in our homes. I have a hot water heater. I transfer the energy from burning gas into hot water to use it when I want a shower. Many people do this with electricity. Millions of houses in the US could conserve a LOT of energy by using solar hot water heaters and yet we do not. Why?
If we really want to examine energy use properly, we need to start looking at energy from the point of view of the second law of thermodynamics, not the first law.
Why do we continue to build homes with electric hot water heaters? Why do we only continue to look at renewables with an eye to generating electricity when they could be doing so much more?
Thanks.
Both the informative article and various comments don’t quite seem to bring the thesis home. Imo, there is a balancing of technology and policy that is essential to any wave of disruption we might be hoping for. Technology is a pretty straight forward business, and that lends itself to getting more focus. Policy is incredibly hard work and has a minimal baseline upon which to build. Because policy is hard and we are human, we lean towards technology solutions as our potential saviours. I certainly don’t disavow technology as its own physician, but I emphasize that most of the work now needs to be on the policy side.
I have every faith that most renewable energy technologies will improve year over year, the storage of that energy will get less expensive and the grid will get smarter. Plenty of room for improvement and we are early in the cycle (think T. Edison and N. Tesla here).
Again and again, I see people referencing economic negative externalities, i.e. what is the true cost of lung cancer, etc.? This is a well seasoned discussion that is hardly newsworthy. What would be newsworthy is the advancement of policies that bring these factors internal to the OMP expense calculation.
I’m likely somewhat north of the several hundred million people who have already said this, but the concept of cheap energy, gasoline that is less than the cost of bottled water, and the reversal of 250 million years of carbon sequestration in approximately two centuries, is totally broken as designed.
Without meaning to fan any flames, the free market is totally and utterly incapable of solving this class of problem. We need a ‘higher’ view, if we at all aspire to being good stewards of the only planet we have at the moment.