The UAE’s nuclear power plans don’t disprove the rule that the nuclear game is usually more to do with geopolitics than actual electricity.

The Emirates are a weird melting-pot; both as Islamic and as capitalist as it is possible to be, with an enormous expatriate population (only 20% of residents are locally born — there are as many Persians in the Arab Emirates as there are Arabs). The Emirates are on paper thoroughly in America’s pocket but are also a central ‘neutral’ location for international industry bazaars (especially the arms industry) and for bypassing the legal red tape that various countries place on businesses trading with official ‘enemies’.

Iran, France and the USA are all rattling their nuclear sabres on ‘neutral’ territory. I’m sure that the US and France hope to seize a slice of the Iranian nuclear pie from this bridgehead just across the Gulf as the Islamic Republic inevitably crumbles from within.

As for the expense of wind power — yes, the maintenance costs are a little higher than for coal-fired power, but the fuel is free. The cost of maintenance for nuclear power stations is actually far higher, because whenever one tiny thing goes wrong generators have to go offline in lumps of hundreds of megawats or entire power stations, requiring enormous backup resources, whereas it’s a trivial matter to take one 2MW windmill off the grid for an hour or (if necessary) a week while maintenance is scheduled.

It’s clear you don’t have a handle on the difference between units of power and generation capacity — just from the web page you refer to, *existing* Texan wind farms already annually produce 1,190,000,000 kWh of electricity each year and the biggest wind farm on-the-drawing-board is expected to have a *peak capacity* of 283 *megawatts* — not “283 KwH”. 283 kilowatt hours per what? Did you mean “per hour”? “Per year”?

Google is your friend. Try asking it “30 percent of 283 megawatts in kilowatt hours per year”:

http://www.google.com/search?q=30+percent+of+283+megawatts+in+kilowatt+hours+per+year

Now absorb that number. The City of Houston pays 9.1c per kilowatt hour for electricity, delivered. Give half to the middle man to cover the cost of transmission (and of backup power from the gas generators Enron built to suck money out of Texan consumers in the 90s — gas is far too expensive now to use them as baseload) and multiply those kilowatt hours by just 4.5c. Forty million dollars worth of clean wind power, every year. Capital costs of wind farms are now on the order of $2-$3 per watt (they were under $1 for a brief moment around 2003 but steel prices have soared since), so a 283MW one should cost between $500m and (outside risk) $1b, so the return in the first year of operation will be between 4% and 8%. Not the most lucrative business in the world (obviously it’s a better story for those who built in 2003) but show me one nuclear power plant turning a profit!

The bulk of the cost of wind, solar or geothermal power is in the initial capital, just as it is for nuclear power. On paper you can make either look cheaper just by fiddling with discount rates and NPVs. But the up-front cost of wind farms (and other established small-scale generation technologies) is predictable and declining because of mass-production and competition amongst suppliers (which also means the technology evolves much more quickly), and the returns begin almost immediately so the accounting fiddles (and therefore the consequences of the occasional financial meltdown) are far smaller.

If I had a SL I could get my rants published nationally for free.

That’s the power of a Social License>>

I guess the first thing that disqualifies you from a social licence is asserting the need for everyone to have a social licence

So you want a Social License… What is it? What’s it good for? And where can you get one?
The all powerful, very cool. and dare I say it, mystical Social License!
Not everyone can have one. But more about that later.

So what is a Social License?
A Social License gives you permission to comment on subjects that you have no training in but feel your opinions are better than people who’ve studied and researched the area for 10, 12 or even 20 years. So, you might feel strongly about Tasmanian Devils, and with a Social License your views are given equal weight with those of a Professor of Zoology! How cool is that?

What’s a Social License good for?
Aside from the obvious power, you can use it just about however you like. In essence what you say becomes “reality”! Imagine you really hate Gunns. When they say they want to make clean Green electricity with a Biomass Generator your Social License allows you to say “Gunns should leaving saving the Planet to the people who care about it” and get it published in National News Media. That is amazing you say? Well, Gunns doesn’t have a Social License and you have. So even though you know nothing about anything other than feel-good mother-craft statements you’re in there, instant power!

How to get a Social License.
Not everyone can have a Social License. Obviously, you have to be “better”. And that’s the secret to getting a Social License. You have to be special, have special powers and knowledge. But not real knowledge, that’s for intellectuals. The best way to get a Social License is to join a pseudo-political group that’s got a few spare. We’re talking Australian Conservation Foundation, The Greens, The Tasmanian Greens (they have heaps, just lying around), The Wilderness Society etc. But you don’t just get a Social License, you get access to dozens of slightly woolly brained potential sexual partners!

Score!

For the very simple reason that there is now no longer time. We have an impending disaster unfolding around us that requires that we eliminate CO2 emissions completely within perhaps the next decade or two. Certainly, lets say, by 2050. That timeframe does not allow us to try a renewables only strategy, find it doesn’t work, and then reluctantly implement a nuclear base.

Maybe that choice was possible back in the 70s, when the oil shocks gave everyone fair warning that fossil fuels were finite. Maybe 100% renewables could have been tried back then, and we’d now be finding out if it could be done, or not, and whether we needed nukes, or not. But we didn’t, and we wind up here, now, in 2009 with scant renewable power, a modest nuclear contribution, and the rest is coal, oil and gas. And we have to completely reengineer the worlds energy infrastructure to not just provide power when the last three run out, but to keep as much of those fuels as possible in the ground, before we hit climate tipping points to a world you don’t want to know about.

This is a one shot chance. We get one go at getting this right.

No one’s “dissing” renewables or efficiency. Quite the contrary, as immediately deployable clean energy technologies they’re critical to rapidly cutting CO2 emissions. But to replace coal, gas and oil in the necessary timeframe, or even at all, the numbers don’t add up, so while we’re rolling out the wind turbines we’d better be planning a nuclear rollout.

The endgame is zero CO2 emissions. Not economic displacement of coal. Not 80% renewables and efficiency with 20% gas fired backup. Its not going to be easy. How’s about we actually TRY everything we’ve got and see if we can even achieve it, rather than diss the nuclear option? Eh? Why not try?

The UAE is pursuing nuclear power, it is an oil rich country and I do not think it is part of some cunning plan to take on the West.

See: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html

Yes all these nations have got it wrong and Australia is right.

A modern reactor can generate 1000 KwH. Future reactors will generate more. A new planned wind farm in Texas will generate 283 KwH but will need 118 of the latest wind powered generators/towers to do that. So to get close to what an existing nuclear power plant can generate around 416 wind powered generators would need to be installed. These are not small desk top units, there are massive…just think of the land required…in a windy location.

See for yourself: http://www.awea.org/projects/Projects.aspx?s=Texas

Oh and wind powered generators need lot’s of maintenance and the gearboxes need to be replaced occasionally. Hence the cost per KwH is quite high as per the report I provided earlier.

The upfront costs are not cheap either, some new large wind farms are expected to cost over 2 billion USD and this does not include the annual rent needed to pay farmers/landowners or land acquisition costs.

Yes a lot of nuclear power technology is cutting edge and there are project risks, so are people suggesting Australia should just give up on anything that seems a little challenging?

What would be the big deal is setting up a trial reactor somewhere and trying to develop a new high industry in this country?

I am not aware of any oil-rich country seriously pursuing nuclear electricity today without an ulterior military/strategic/phallic motive. However the fossil-fuel economics which made sense in the 1970s for Japan and France to develop nuclear power today apply to every country — except that today, renewable electricity is cost-competitive in a way which was not on the radar in the 1970s.

There is NO reliable data on the real cost of *new* nuclear power. The cost of running an existing nuclear power station is low and known but the capital costs of power stations built in the 1970s and 1980s are already paid off and — as every result in the search link you provides mentions — the cost of any new nuclear power station is dominated by the cost of capital (upredictable in the current climate even given a fixed schedule) and the completion timetable (highly variable in any climate except one of a steadily expanding, experienced, professional nuclear industry such as France, Japan and the USSR had in the 1970s). Of course, the ultimate capital cost includes the interest incurred during construction overruns.

EDF’s spin-off AREVA was supposed to deliver the newest and cheapest nuclear energy ever for Finland at Olkiluto, but planning errors, general inexperience (even French engineers are out of practice at building new nuclear power stations), the fluctuating cost of construction materials and the financial crisis all combine: the ultimate capital cost of this power station (with interest) will be at least TREBLE the initial quote. Meaning the ultimate price of its electricity to consumers, or whomever bails out the project, will be at least double the original promised discount, meaning less will be required as Finnish homes and industry aggressively adopt efficiency measures, and consumers won’t even have the option of using that additional power until at least three or four years after it was promised.

On the other hand, the real cost of new small-scale electric generators such as solar PV, small dish Stirling engine solar thermal, wind turbines, traditional internal-combustion gensets and cogeneration (combined heat and power) installations is very well understood and predictable. This equipment is mass-produced, delivered on demand, and provides electricity as soon as you plug it in: it is not constructed in place on a timetable of four-or-eight-or-maybe-twelve years and a cost of billions before any power is delivered. The lead times for mass-produced generators are negligibly short by comparison with brand-new nuclear designs on the gigawatt scale, so the risk of capital cost overruns is also negligible.

1. for the inland reactors (using rivers to cool) “When water temperatures rise, EDF is forced to shut down the reactors to prevent their casings from exceeding 50C”. What casings, where on the reactor? Suggests the river water is too warm to properly cool the reactor itself. But why shut down rather than run at reduced power?

2. inland reactors again, there are limits on the maximum temperature of output cooling water: “EDF must also observe strict rules governing the heat of the water it discharges into waterways so that wildlife is not harmed. The maximum permitted temperature is 24C.” But… “In 2003, the situation grew so severe that the French nuclear safety regulator granted special exemptions to three plants, allowing them temporarily to discharge water into rivers at temperatures as high as 30C.” so again there is an option without buying power from the UK.

3. “a ten-week strike by power workers and ongoing repairs.” IOW, there’s capacity off-line due to technical problems and the repairers are on strike.

So which is it? Or all three? In what proportion? Can someone explain point 1?

Incidentally, I understand the waste heat problem with nuclear power station is worse than coal ones for two reasons: (a) the thermal efficiency is generally lower (certainly in the case of the PWRs the French use) so there’s more waste heat to start with (b) in a coal-fired station a lot of the waste heat goes straight out the chimney, whereas with a nuclear station ALL the heat has to be carried out by the coolant.

BTW, fast reactors (with more efficient fuel usage and higher thermal efficiency) have been around since the 1950s and still aren’t ready for large-scale generation. The French abandoned Super-Phenix (sp?) which I understand was off-line so often during its life that it used more electricity than it produced (power being needed to keep the sodium in the primary cooling loop liquid) and the Japanese have had all sorts of problems with Monju. In terms of having been tomorrows energy forever fast reactors are almost on a par with fusion

BTW, I accept that some countries have no alternative to nuclear. That doesn’t mean I like the technology. Jimmy Carter (ex US Navy nuclear engineer) had it right: the energy of last resort.

I hear people in Australia talking about the high cost of nuclear power but the only solid data I can find disputes this: See: http://www.googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u/raeng?q=+cost+generation&sa=Go

Tim Hollo – 1950’s nuke technology? Have you ever been anywhere near a modern nuclear power plant?….they moved on from the 1950’s a long, long time ago. The plants that are currently being built are state of the art facilities and the next generation of reactors contain technology that Australia will probably not see for decades. I am not dismissing renewable energy I am just supporting the nuclear option as well. Australia is backward because we will talk about things for years, have little idea of what is happening overseas and then never actually do anything.
(We are still waiting for the second airport in Sydney and a high speed rail link to Canberra for example….but of course there is plenty of talk about doing something!)

Barry, good point re geothermal – my mistake. However, on the bigger, picture, how’s abou we actually TRY the renewables and efficiency solution before we diss it? Eh? Why not try?

I don’t buy the old “it can’t be done lines. It’s what car manufacturers in the US told FDR when he asked them to retool for a war footing in 1941, and he told them he didn’t care if they thought it couldn’t be done. It had to be done. So they did it. Same for the Apollo missions. It was an impossibly huge task and it was achieved. Let’s try!

Greg @ 10 – um, why is it backward to talk about new renewable energy technology and move away from 1950s nukes technology? In what way is it backward to talk about linking broadband internet and electricity grids to create smart grid infrastructure? It’s those who diss renewables who are being luddite (ruddite?).