You can make the calculation return any result you want, for example by including cost of millennia of nuclear waste storage in price of nuclear power; another thing—nuclear power gets massive federal insurance subsidies (but then coal gets free license to kill people by pollution etc., so it’s not exclusively nuclear problem).
If you know what result you want, you will be able to come up with it.
You can make the calculation return any result you want, for example by including cost of millennia of nuclear waste storage in price of nuclear power;
You can calculate arbitrarily high costs for anything if you try hard enough. What of it? We’re not going to deal with nuclear waste by sticking it in Yucca Mountain and guarding it for thousands of years; that would be silly. Here’s a summary of how to realistically deal with nuclear waste. We have more than enough money for this budgeted as part of every nuclear plant’s operating and maintenance fees.
another thing—nuclear power gets massive federal insurance subsidies
Not true (PDF warning). The nuclear industry runs its own insurance pool, paid for out of their own pocket. The regulations requiring this do say that the federal government may help out in extreme circumstances (i.e. something on the scale of Chernobyl) but to date the feds haven’t spent a dime on this. And I see no reason to believe that they ever will.
If you know what result you want, you will be able to come up with it.
If you’re motivated to play games with the figures, consciously or not, then sure you can. But I try to avoid that sort of thing, and it tends to be pretty obvious.
Note that I’m not accusing you of dishonesty—but I’m guessing that you ultimately got those arguments from someone who was trying to make the numbers fit his position, rather than the other way around.
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.
I won’t bother looking up figures as I’m not terribly interested in long term nuclear waste, but you’re wrong about insurance (at least your argument is wrong, not necessarily the conclusion).
Implicit or explicit guarantee for extreme cases are worth trillions. There were some papers measuring how much even implicit guarantee was worth for Fannie Mae/Freddie Mae, and this was enormous amounts by letting them raise money far cheaper than would be otherwise possible (and taxpayers eventually paid, but it was beneficial to Fannie/Freddie long before that).
Do you consider the law regarding car liability insurance to be a subsidy? It requires you to carry liability insurance up to a finite amount, despite the fact that you can do much more damage than that with your car, and then bankruptcy law will shield you from paying the full amount.
This is the same kind of insurance nuclear plants have: they’re require to have an insurance on up to $X of damages, and then “someone else” bears any cost beyond this.
Nuclear plants can’t be insured for the damages in a meltdown. Not because the risk is so huge that it should never be done, but because any jury award would be effectively infinite, irrespective of the actual damage. There’s no point to buying insurance when the uncovered liability increases in lockstep with your insurance coverage. However, the actual meltdown risk is extremely small and even the required insurance is effectively overinsuring the plants.
This nuclear plant “insurance” can’t be compared to what FM/FM had because they are able to continue operation and making profits after a “meltdown”, while a nuclear plant would be over and done with.
If you don’t like the kind of uncovered liability nuclear plants have, they’re the least of your concerns—you really should be advocating an end to driving, since no driver can meet the insurance standard you seem to expect out of nuclear plants.
Now, with that said, you are correct that comparisons of green technologies to coal do conveniently leave off the damage that coal plants spill off onto other people and are therefore misleading. I’ve long railed against assessments of coal that ignore the cost of dumping toxic crap into people’s lungs. Example. (ETA:Better example.) Still, that requires an objective accounting of environmental costs, not just (as is often the case) assuming they’re infinite.
Making drivers not responsible for damages they cause is a massive subsidy, and without it we’d have far more investment in car safety (and I mean genuine kind like replacing human drivers with robots, black boxes, and compulsory alcohol testers before it lets you drive, not current air bag waste of time), and far fewer deaths and injuries.
Pardon, but I don’t see how this is responsive to my comment.
1) Drivers are made responsible for the damages they cause, up to the limits imposed by bankruptcy law; the law also attempts to ensure [sic] that each driver on the road is capable of paying up to $X in damages. What they are not made responsible for is arbitrarily large damage they could potentially do, but this is unavoidable—no one is capable of setting aside that much money, even solar power operators (or rich people).
2) In absence of “making drivers not responsible for damages they cause”, we most certainly would not have more investment in car safety; we wouldn’t have cars, period. (BrE: Full stop.) Or, without the multiple negatives: If everyone driving had to be capable paying all damages they could ever potentially do with their vehicle, no one would be allowed to drive, or use most technologies. I don’t think you’re understanding the implications of this requirement.
Yes, drivers—and nuke plants—should carry insurance. Maybe the required amount (in either case) is too high. Or too low. Or derived from the wrong process. But no one can insure unlimited liability, so the safety improvements you describe just wouldn’t happen if that were a requirement; the technology just wouldn’t be used. But once you accept that people should only have to insure up to a finite amount, and given the low, self-borne risk of nuclear plants, you must accept that they already meet this.
3) Arguably, the reason we don’t already have self-driven cars is precisely the phenomenon I warned about: uncovered liability increasing in lockstep with coverage. The average person who kills someone with their vehicle is typically required to pay a lot less than when it is done by a wealthy corporation. Given jury reactions to new technologies and wealthy corporations, if someone actually did offer self-driving cars, they could very well have to pay out more in damages, even if they were safer than 99% of human drivers!
You can make the calculation return any result you want, for example by including cost of millennia of nuclear waste storage in price of nuclear power; another thing—nuclear power gets massive federal insurance subsidies (but then coal gets free license to kill people by pollution etc., so it’s not exclusively nuclear problem).
If you know what result you want, you will be able to come up with it.
You can calculate arbitrarily high costs for anything if you try hard enough. What of it? We’re not going to deal with nuclear waste by sticking it in Yucca Mountain and guarding it for thousands of years; that would be silly. Here’s a summary of how to realistically deal with nuclear waste. We have more than enough money for this budgeted as part of every nuclear plant’s operating and maintenance fees.
Not true (PDF warning). The nuclear industry runs its own insurance pool, paid for out of their own pocket. The regulations requiring this do say that the federal government may help out in extreme circumstances (i.e. something on the scale of Chernobyl) but to date the feds haven’t spent a dime on this. And I see no reason to believe that they ever will.
If you’re motivated to play games with the figures, consciously or not, then sure you can. But I try to avoid that sort of thing, and it tends to be pretty obvious.
Note that I’m not accusing you of dishonesty—but I’m guessing that you ultimately got those arguments from someone who was trying to make the numbers fit his position, rather than the other way around.
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.
I won’t bother looking up figures as I’m not terribly interested in long term nuclear waste, but you’re wrong about insurance (at least your argument is wrong, not necessarily the conclusion).
Implicit or explicit guarantee for extreme cases are worth trillions. There were some papers measuring how much even implicit guarantee was worth for Fannie Mae/Freddie Mae, and this was enormous amounts by letting them raise money far cheaper than would be otherwise possible (and taxpayers eventually paid, but it was beneficial to Fannie/Freddie long before that).
Do you consider the law regarding car liability insurance to be a subsidy? It requires you to carry liability insurance up to a finite amount, despite the fact that you can do much more damage than that with your car, and then bankruptcy law will shield you from paying the full amount.
This is the same kind of insurance nuclear plants have: they’re require to have an insurance on up to $X of damages, and then “someone else” bears any cost beyond this.
Nuclear plants can’t be insured for the damages in a meltdown. Not because the risk is so huge that it should never be done, but because any jury award would be effectively infinite, irrespective of the actual damage. There’s no point to buying insurance when the uncovered liability increases in lockstep with your insurance coverage. However, the actual meltdown risk is extremely small and even the required insurance is effectively overinsuring the plants.
This nuclear plant “insurance” can’t be compared to what FM/FM had because they are able to continue operation and making profits after a “meltdown”, while a nuclear plant would be over and done with.
If you don’t like the kind of uncovered liability nuclear plants have, they’re the least of your concerns—you really should be advocating an end to driving, since no driver can meet the insurance standard you seem to expect out of nuclear plants.
Now, with that said, you are correct that comparisons of green technologies to coal do conveniently leave off the damage that coal plants spill off onto other people and are therefore misleading. I’ve long railed against assessments of coal that ignore the cost of dumping toxic crap into people’s lungs. Example. (ETA: Better example.) Still, that requires an objective accounting of environmental costs, not just (as is often the case) assuming they’re infinite.
Making drivers not responsible for damages they cause is a massive subsidy, and without it we’d have far more investment in car safety (and I mean genuine kind like replacing human drivers with robots, black boxes, and compulsory alcohol testers before it lets you drive, not current air bag waste of time), and far fewer deaths and injuries.
Pardon, but I don’t see how this is responsive to my comment.
1) Drivers are made responsible for the damages they cause, up to the limits imposed by bankruptcy law; the law also attempts to ensure [sic] that each driver on the road is capable of paying up to $X in damages. What they are not made responsible for is arbitrarily large damage they could potentially do, but this is unavoidable—no one is capable of setting aside that much money, even solar power operators (or rich people).
2) In absence of “making drivers not responsible for damages they cause”, we most certainly would not have more investment in car safety; we wouldn’t have cars, period. (BrE: Full stop.) Or, without the multiple negatives: If everyone driving had to be capable paying all damages they could ever potentially do with their vehicle, no one would be allowed to drive, or use most technologies. I don’t think you’re understanding the implications of this requirement.
Yes, drivers—and nuke plants—should carry insurance. Maybe the required amount (in either case) is too high. Or too low. Or derived from the wrong process. But no one can insure unlimited liability, so the safety improvements you describe just wouldn’t happen if that were a requirement; the technology just wouldn’t be used. But once you accept that people should only have to insure up to a finite amount, and given the low, self-borne risk of nuclear plants, you must accept that they already meet this.
3) Arguably, the reason we don’t already have self-driven cars is precisely the phenomenon I warned about: uncovered liability increasing in lockstep with coverage. The average person who kills someone with their vehicle is typically required to pay a lot less than when it is done by a wealthy corporation. Given jury reactions to new technologies and wealthy corporations, if someone actually did offer self-driving cars, they could very well have to pay out more in damages, even if they were safer than 99% of human drivers!