Control Engineering

Peter Welander

Nuclear power: Cheap but very expensive
May 7, 2008

During this time of evaluating energy sources and effects, nuclear power is back in the limelight. An article in today's Chicago Tribune points out that while the cost of producing nuclear power ($1.72/ kW hour) has become even cheaper than coal (not to mention one-third the cost of burning natural gas and one-fifth the cost of burning oil) the cost of building nuclear plants has become clearly the most expensive.

Indeed, over the last year the price of building a nuclear reactor has effectively doubled and is now around $9 billion. Nonetheless, the NRC is currently reviewing nine applications that will involve 15 plants throughout the U.S. The federal government has set aside $18.5 billion in loan guarantees, but given the costs involved, that won't go very far.

Part of our problem nationally is that the last new plant was started in 1977. While it's easy to second guess history, imagine where we might be today if we had continued to build a new plant or two each year since then. While there are many advantages of wind and solar and we should be expanding that capacity, they are intermittent sources and we need the reliability of base-loaded plants to carry us through times when those are not available. I suspect it's largely a matter of will.

Posted by Peter Welander on May 7, 2008 | Comments (0)