None of this has anything to do with MOX fuel, however.

Thanks for your absolutely intellectually, ambiguous enlightenment. I will go straight into the internet void and seek it out. Such genius!

I have bigger problems with your graphs on the costs of “popular renewables” wind and solar. These figures seem overly optimistic. The problem is that most of the data on actual impacts and even production is held as “proprietary.” It is not available for peer review.

And wind and solar are not comparable as apples to apples unless you’ve accounted for the grid capacity factors. Actual plant capacity is generally acceptable for conventional fuel plants (including nuke),because those are much closer to grid capacity. The problem with wind and solar is that they produce unpredictably and sporadically. Their usefulness on the grid is very low compared to controlled sources.

The companies who benefit from subsidies to install these machines or arrays also rate capacity by grouping all the sporadic instances of power production in order to claim a certain plant produced so many kilowatt hours this month. The problem is that measurement fails to account for whether that power was produced during a period when it was needed, or was produced off-demand when it did little more than annoy the grid operator responsible for dumping it.

Power production must closely match demand or you burn things up and waste resources. Wind and solar both hide the fact that much of their energy production is off-demand and wasted yet they want to count those kwhs as being of the same value as on-demand production. Please don’t aide them in this charade.

For a glimpse of this fact, you can view the German E-on Netz report from about 2005, where E-on operates large wind facilities in Germany. Their own report showed the wind machines had a capacity of about 20 percent or 25. (Again, that is counting all kwhs as useful.) But then they spill the beans by reporting their grid capacity was about 8 percent! At that rate the wind operations are nul and void for meaningful grid use. Solar is no different really.

To “scale up” these renewables you need something else. That something is storage capacity on mass scale, and that is not on a near or medium term horizon. By medium I mean 10 years and that is long enough that the current capacity being deployed in the field now will be terribly out of date.

So, if you are worried about dirty environmental problems in the here and now, you want coal to take a back seat to nuclear (both baseloads). Gas then becomes the clean peak dispatchable and mid-range fuel of choice.

Renewables currently being deployed do not work and scaling them up is not the answer to why they don’t work. The storage capacity cart is before the horse here.

Also due to the unreliability of the renewables mentioned here, the entire generating profile for any given area must be kept spinning even when these renewables happen to come on line. So there is large inefficiency in creating an entire duplicate generating capacity that requires the old one to keep running or face a black out.

It is analagous to buying an expensive bike to ride to work, then riding it about 5 days a month but requiring a bus to shadow you every time because you get lots of flat tires. The bus won’t burn quite as much fuel as if you were on it, but the amount saved is negligable.

A better answer might be to continue to use nuclear and gas while putting most of our development efforts into storage. Once mass scale storage is achieved it makes renewables a whole different story.

The only renewable you didn’t mention here is the one that actually does work. It is geothermal and if you spent the money now wasted on wind machines into deploying geothermal in residential applications, we could save enough electricity to seriously chop peak demand. The biggest savings come during the summer when demand drives the annual peak, and when geothermal aggressively cuts that peak.

In addition, electric demand fell for the first time since WWII when the economy crashed in 2008. A continuation of offshoring jobs will reduce factory consumption of electric energy in the next 5 years and should be considered when proposing new generating facilities.

You do not provide any reference for your projections. The following refutes your projections:

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released a draft of it’s Annual Energy Outlook, forecasting US energy trends out to 2035.

Coal drops by 6% (from 45% to 39%) – Coal drops 17 gigawatts
Natural gas rises by 3% (from 24% to 27%) – Natural gas adds 103 gigawatts
Renewables rise 6% (from 10% to 16%) – Renewables add 43 gigawatts
Nuclear drops 2% from (20% to 18%) – Nuclear adds 11 gigawatts

The reduction in use of coal fired power generation is due to increasing costs and environmental laws. Natural gas is projected to remain low cost for 20 to 50 years or more. The increase in use of natural gas for power generation is due to low capital cost, environmental laws and high efficiency. Little in the way of new nuclear is predicted because of high capital costs – which kills nuclear power – it is not cost effective in US.

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/executive_summary.cfm
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/early_elecgen.cfm

Thank you for your analysis and pointing out that the current costs for a combined cycle plant are lower than for a current Nuclear power plant. However, your analysis does not consider the market effect of rising gas prices on the price of electricty. For the Utility which gets to pass on fuel costs – rising costs do not affect their capital decisions, but for a consumer using natural gas for electric production will mean that the current glut will be quickly mopped up and prices WILL RISE.

Natural Gas = High Price Electricity in the Future
Nuclear = Low Priced Electricity in the Future.

As I understand it, they are worth about $6 billion to the first few nuclear power plants built and operated. Production tax credits are subsidies.

“In the Fukishima, the containment structure on one of the reactors cracked and a small amount of radioactive coolant got out, and in a few others, the fuel melted due to decay heat, but stayed in the reactors.”

I wonder why a nuclear expert Brian Mays did not correct the above false statements made by baobrien.

The statements by baobrien are totally wrong. Reactor coolant was being released to the environment from all three of the reactors with fuel melting. Most of it drained into the sea. Where does he think the reactor water went when the fuel was uncovered – to the environment of course (via steam release and water draining into the turbine buildings). Where does he think the reactor cooling water went when they were pumping tons of sea water into the reactors – to the environment of course (via steam release and water draining into the turbine buildings).

It is amazing to me that baobrien thinks that the radionuclides got out of the reactors and spread over a large area of Fukushima by magic. The volatile radioactive materials were vented along with steam and the rest released by reactor coolant water draining into basements and tunnels through cracks and broken pipes.

I looked at the anaysis you provided. I found the analysis in the excel spreadsheet to be faulty when it comes to natural gas fired power plants. The following are my problems with the analysis:

1. It only looks at only one small (47 MW) natural gas peaking power plant and compares it to two large nuclear power plants (2300 MW). The analysis should have used a large 500+ MW modern combined cycle natural gas fired power plant. Here are a couple of examples:

http://www.powermag.com/gas/GE-Develops-FlexEfficiency-50-fo...

http://www.energy.siemens.com.cn/CN/downloadCenter/Documents...

2. It uses a very low capacity factor of 11.4% for the natural gas peaking power plant while using a very high capacity factor of 91.8% for nuclear power plant. Nuclear plants rarely reach 91.8% capacity factor – a more realistic number would be 90%. Combined cycle natural power plants can be run at the same 90% capacity factor.

3. It uses natural gas prices based on 2008 data. New data for 2010 and 2011 would show the prices at least 50% lower. There is a glut of natural gas in the US.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9SA5A503.htm

4. The estimated construction cost of a combined cycle natural gas fired power plant is not provided.

The GE Energy 510-MW FlexEfficiency 50 is designed to fit in a space as small as 10 acres and can be constructed in 24 months. A nuclear power plant takes much more space and takes more than 5 years to construct.

In all the cost studies I have seen natural gas fired power plants are the winners in levelized cost. This appears to be what the utility companies are also finding to be true, as that is what they are building and planning to build along with wind power.