Another thing to calculate on the cost of nuclear power:
photovoltaics don’t have evacuation plans, labled evacuation routes, large government monitoring safety boards, or National Guard/Air Force aerial defense concerns.
It’s hard to look up data on so-called “externalities” like that.
Solar power requires heavy industry to build, and that has loads of externalities. It takes up a lot of space and affects local climate and ecology. And then there’s the unreliability of the sun, which can have economic consequences.
As for the nuclear externalities you mentioned, the evacuation planning and government safety things are paid for by power plant fees, and budgeted into the cost of building and operating the plants. Defending the plants is something you have to do with all forms of power generation, and I actually think you’re miscalculating the risks by looking at the power plants themselves, which (in the case of nuclear) tend to be pretty beefy and well-guarded. Attacking the transmission lines would be much easier, and much harder to defend against. This goes double for wind and solar farms that are located far away from everything and have to use longer power lines.
(And really, what are the odds you’ll ever have to use those evacuation plans? I’d worry more about crossing the street. No water-moderated reactor has ever had an accident that made evacuating people nearby a good idea, even after all these decades of operating them, and there are good theoretical and practical reasons to believe that it never will.)
And while we’re looking at externalities, consider this: nuclear is the only option that’s currently competitive with coal on a cost-per-kWh basis. Very cautious safety regulations, by holding nuclear power back, are responsible for a lot of coal emissions—which are far more dangerous than anything people are talking about for nuclear plants. Paradoxically, our worries about nuclear safety have made us much less safe. What we have here is a widespread failure to shut up and multiply.
I really like this as a test-case for rationality, because it’s important and we really can look at it probabilistically for insight.
As a point withiin the greater whole, I don’t think that the security requirements of photovoltaics are the same as those for a nuclear reactor. Also, security difference between “spent” photovoltaic cells v. spent nuclear fuels?
In any case, the overarching point: “you wouldn’t believe the amount of nonsense that can be disposed of simply by looking up the relevant numbers and doing a minute’s worth of easy arithmetic.” turns out to not be so simple, because there are a lot of issues involved. There’s the issue of disposal, which you show a link to, but you don’t seem to have incorporated those numbers. There’s the issue of how much taxpayer money goes into scrambling jets near Indian Point each time alerts are raised, etc. The calculation clearly isn’t easy in the present, and also does not incorporate the cost/benefits analysis of focusing on photvoltaics because ultimately they will almost certainly be more efficient (your efficiency/production rates for existing infrastructure doesn’t reflect changes and advances in technology, of which there are many). In short, “easy arithmetic” isn’t always so easy.
Another thing to calculate on the cost of nuclear power:
photovoltaics don’t have evacuation plans, labled evacuation routes, large government monitoring safety boards, or National Guard/Air Force aerial defense concerns.
It’s hard to look up data on so-called “externalities” like that.
Solar power requires heavy industry to build, and that has loads of externalities. It takes up a lot of space and affects local climate and ecology. And then there’s the unreliability of the sun, which can have economic consequences.
As for the nuclear externalities you mentioned, the evacuation planning and government safety things are paid for by power plant fees, and budgeted into the cost of building and operating the plants. Defending the plants is something you have to do with all forms of power generation, and I actually think you’re miscalculating the risks by looking at the power plants themselves, which (in the case of nuclear) tend to be pretty beefy and well-guarded. Attacking the transmission lines would be much easier, and much harder to defend against. This goes double for wind and solar farms that are located far away from everything and have to use longer power lines.
(And really, what are the odds you’ll ever have to use those evacuation plans? I’d worry more about crossing the street. No water-moderated reactor has ever had an accident that made evacuating people nearby a good idea, even after all these decades of operating them, and there are good theoretical and practical reasons to believe that it never will.)
And while we’re looking at externalities, consider this: nuclear is the only option that’s currently competitive with coal on a cost-per-kWh basis. Very cautious safety regulations, by holding nuclear power back, are responsible for a lot of coal emissions—which are far more dangerous than anything people are talking about for nuclear plants. Paradoxically, our worries about nuclear safety have made us much less safe. What we have here is a widespread failure to shut up and multiply.
I really like this as a test-case for rationality, because it’s important and we really can look at it probabilistically for insight.
As a point withiin the greater whole, I don’t think that the security requirements of photovoltaics are the same as those for a nuclear reactor. Also, security difference between “spent” photovoltaic cells v. spent nuclear fuels?
In any case, the overarching point: “you wouldn’t believe the amount of nonsense that can be disposed of simply by looking up the relevant numbers and doing a minute’s worth of easy arithmetic.” turns out to not be so simple, because there are a lot of issues involved. There’s the issue of disposal, which you show a link to, but you don’t seem to have incorporated those numbers. There’s the issue of how much taxpayer money goes into scrambling jets near Indian Point each time alerts are raised, etc.
The calculation clearly isn’t easy in the present, and also does not incorporate the cost/benefits analysis of focusing on photvoltaics because ultimately they will almost certainly be more efficient (your efficiency/production rates for existing infrastructure doesn’t reflect changes and advances in technology, of which there are many).
In short, “easy arithmetic” isn’t always so easy.