I have little to no faith in costing estimates of nuclear power unless you include:

1. Liquid financial reserves to be held to pay for resolving, containing and cleaning up accidents. Must assume that 5% of reactors operated by a single company will fail within a 2 year period to properly cater for real disaster.

2. Complete cost for cleanup and decommission of plants

3. Complete cost for safe storage of nuclear waste for the next 10,000 years.

Haven't seen one that does this and will not accept the lies of the nuclear industry on this topic.

If you factor that in the nuclear option is actually very expensive and looks like what it is: another grab by the oil industry to continue monopolising a finite resource to the detriment of the population as a whole.

On another note...I love this new program..let's look at the 100% renewables option clearly before we start thinking we have to compromise our future.

So if the TRUE costs are included, why did the company operating the Fukushima reactor go bust as soon as the accident happened?

The nuclear industry cannot be trusted.

Why do the solar companies go broke after they've been given massive government handouts? On the basis of your argument, the solar industry cannot be trusted. You comment is silly.

Why did the nuclear company go bust after even larger government handouts, subsidies and assistance to build it?

Because they made no provision for disaster. It seems they believed the PR of the nuclear industry as a whole. If they had to keep reserves to handle disaster I doubt it would remain cost effective. And they should be forced to maintain such reserves permanently.

Why do solar companies go bust?

"the U.S. Commerce Department has decided to impose stiff tariffs on Chinese imports. In a preliminary ruling, Commerce said Chinese companies were swamping the U.S. market with government-subsidized products."

http://www.ibtimes.com/abound-bankrupt-third-government-backed-solar-firm-goes-bust-within-year-704830

Because they have a poor business model that doesn't operate well in the global market their own government created and expounds. Some level of irony in that.

The lesson from those failures is you should buy solar panels from China and sell them at length...or use the business model of Sungevity, Sunrun and SolarCity... that is really getting big now.

Any other irrelevant comparisons you'd like to present for me to pull apart?

It was going bust because manufacturing in the US is more expensive than China. They couldn't compete.

Which is why I pointed out the lesson learned 'buy from China' should have been known from the start... but the US is also busy trying to create more jobs after offshoring millions of them, so competing initiatives caused the apparent irony...the country proposing free trade agreements everywhere now wants tariffs...

So the business model was fundamentally flawed in achieving what the government wanted to, because the Chinese manufacturers were streets ahead in terms of price and still are.

Which is why I pointed to the booming solar leasing businesses in California today. It's a business model that works with a market audience that doesn't want to know about all the paperwork and stuff, just get the panels fitted and drop their bill significantly.

But since you brought up subsidies... Can you guarantee there are no assumed subsidies and government assistance built into the nuclear industry costing evaluation? Can we remove all public money from supporting them?

Because they receive huge amounts of assistance during build and decomm especially... and as we've seen they then expect govt bailout after disaster.

The nuclear industry, just like the fossil fuel industry takes the adage "Privatise the profits, socialise the losses" as a business plan.

And on the safety front... If people knew 150 years ago that coal power stations were pumping radioactive waste into the environment, along with other pollution and greenhouse gases that would lead to a global environmental catastrophe....if they knew all that..do you think perhaps they would be protesting it just as much as people today protest the nuclear industry?

Saying it kills less people than other really bad ideas is not justification.

The huge numbers of people, animals and all living things that an accident mutates, disables and whose lives are ruined for many many generations, as well as destroying otherwise productive land, think you might be valuing the wrong things.

Omigod, there was a massive accident at the solar farm! Someone cut their finger.

Roger Dargaville,

I am wondering if I should draw any conclusions from the fact you've posted responses to most other comments at the top level on this thread, but did not post a response to this comment?

I am concerned that this may indicate a bias.

If that is true, can we trust the outputs from your model? Or would it be as biased and corrupt as the BZE "Zero Carbon Emissions by 2020" report?

I may be making wrong assumptions. Can you provide any assurance that your group is not biased in favour of any one group of technologies (e.g.renewable energy) and against any others (e.g. nuclear)?

Can you provide assurance that all viable options will be compared without bias or favoritism?

I think in a study exploring 100% renewables, nuclear shouldn't be a consideration at all. Since it is certainly not a renewable energy solution.

$30 billion over 7 years for renewables is pretty good considering the fossil fuel crowd get around $9 billion annually.

We can do better than that definition. Renewable energy is energy that comes from a source that won't run out in the current millennium.

By this definition, solar, wind and hydro are renewable; fossil fuels and nuclear fission are not. Geothermal probably deserves to go in with renewables. Biomass is also renewable if the harvest is limited to the annual increment in standing crop, and soil nutrients are taken into account. Nuclear fusion is always 30 years away from being demonstrated, so doesn't count.

In 2005 the Australian Government commissioned a report on the nuclear industry (the Switkowski report) and on a comparison of all technologies in terms of Greenhouse Intensity and Energy Intensity (ISA Team, Sydney Uni). [ Archived at www.peakoil.org.au/isa.life-cycle-energy-balance.pdf ] People will always argue about the assumptions built into the modelling, so the best that can be done is to be transparent about the assumptions and the methodology. The ISA report meets this requirement. The models are archived with permission of DPM&C at www.peakoil.org.au/isa.nuclear-calculator.xls and www.peakoil.org.au/isa.fossil_and_renewables_calculator.xls
No doubt work on this modelling has continued, but this officially adopted report is the best the Government has to go on at the moment.

The main thing it shows is that the Energy Intensity (inverse of ERoEI ) of solar PV and nuclear fission is very poor. In other words, you need to spend a lot of energy to get a lot of energy. Both clearly make an energy profit over their lifetimes, but hydro-electric and wind make much more energy profit. This is critical to scaling a technology up to national level.

That's a bit silly, but OK, its renewable then.
But I hope you would agree that we should only count the Uranium that could conceivably be extracted with the use of less energy than the fuel rods are ultimately going to produce. So most of the Uranium on and in the planet doesn't count. This can be proved by simply looking at the entropy of mixing.

Unfortunately Thorium isn't fissile. "Thorium reactors" are actually U-233 reactors that promote Th-232 to U-233. So where is all the U-233 going to come from to get the cycle started ? Currently all U-233 comes from reprocessing waste from U-235 reactors, and there is not enough reprocessing capacity to get enough U-233 to replace all fossil fuels. So that is not a starter either.

So Europe has 100GW of wind power deployed?

Why doesn't Australia have this already and more?

Why isn't Australia the world leader in Wind, Wave and Solar power generation?

We have all three fuel sources in abundance, we should be leading the charge....

http://www.ewea.org/index.php?id=60&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=1959&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1&cHash=b7c78662bbf2d63b09f6d5e714236d69

And let's just rain on that parade...

As I mentioned previously, if you factor in the TRUE costs of nuclear power instead of the sales pitch the nuclear industry makes, you discover it is actually the most expensive option.

Your cost argument is invalid.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2059603-2,00.html

http://grist.org/nuclear/2011-09-29-germanys-phaseout-reveals-the-true-costs-of-nuclear-power/

http://www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,16235063,00.html

Constructing nuclear power plants along way from where the energy is needed only creates more problems and inefficiency. It requires the need for unnecessary additional infrastructure to transport the electricity along with the attendant transmission loss.

Maybe we "could" build super safe modern reactors, but are we? Maybe they could be built away from rivers and coasts, but are they?

As for who is going to care about the outback, you'd be surprised. And if you actually visited it, maybe you would to.

Dhugal, when I read statements like "and the U.S. still lacks a plan for nuclear waste" (from the article below) I immediately know the writer is completely ignorant. It's not waste, it's fuel! We fission it away to a few radioactive products and solve climate change and peak energy in the meantime! (The final TRUE waste products only need to be stored for 300 years! This could be in the bomb-proof nuclear power plant's bunker. Waste goes in, and comes out 300 years later as harmless rocks.) Your articles treat depleted uranium 'waste' as an expensive PROBLEM that needs to be SOLVED, when nuclear waste is actually worth around $30 trillion dollars precisely because it could run the world for the next 500 years!! You don't bury a resource like that back underground: you use it to solve climate change and peak energy. I think you need to find more educated authors that, well, have half a clue, and can say "breeder reactor" and GenIV reactor and actually know what they are talking about.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2059603,00.html#ixzz28Js1WeYe

Stop talking engineering, it's not relevant. It doesn't matter that anything is technically possible. It DOES matter how it is handled in the real world.

You have chosen to completely ignore the problem the article points at in terms of the cost of new nuclear plants and the cost of decommission the Germans are uncovering properly now. Uncovering more lies from the nuclear industry.

American business wont touch it without extreme government funding, which tells me it is not a viable solution. The nuclear solution doesn't work at all without massive government intervention to pay all the big bills.

And I dont think that is acceptable policy.

I think it would be much smarter to spend that money to develop multiple paths using renewable energy as the base source to solve the problem...as pointed out at the top of this forum, there are options on using renewables to drive a separate system, eg hydro, molten salt, ammonia, etc

They have free fuel. Nuclear doesn't (no matter how much you want to pretend it is). All we need is harvesters to put the phenomenal amount of energy to use. Then we need to reduce demand for energy by working smarter as well and we build a sustainable society.

Instead of looking to the past for answers, we need to build a future with new answers.

Infinite growth is the philosophy of cancer, why do you want to support that ridiculous idea?

I dont think super grids are the answer.

I think massively decentralised production is the answer. As Roger points out, that comes up as reduced demand for the grid.

What if you made every new building have to generation most, if not all of its power?

What if you used subsidies for individual wisely to encourage the same on existing housing?

What if you phased out fossil fuel generators in favour of mixed systems in the style Barrie points out above?

What if, in short, we stop thinking like the people who got us into this problem and started thinking like people who want to be out of it as soon as possible.

Just because it hasn't been done before is absolutely no reason it cannot be done now. Why do you keep looking to the past for answers it doesn't have?

Instead of thinking of this as a flat engineering problem, it needs to be considered as a societal, environmental and economic problem.

If the net result of moving to renewables is less energy production, then state how much and find ways to achieve it.

I suspect the reality is with a massively decentralised system that combines local renewables with building efficiency and smarter tech design there actually wont be such a problem.

Instead of saying "Crikey! nuclear solves the engineering problem without having to change anything" and running of to do something ultimately stupid and counter productive ... we can consider a multi layered approach to achieve the same end in the same timeline with government investing in a safe and environmentally sustainable future. Rather than ending up wasting public money propping up a vile industry of liars.

I dont want to give the oil companies somewhere to go. I want that way of thinking to die out in a generation. And I still fail to see why we cant make a smarter choice.

Dhugal, you need to get your facts straight. GenIV reactors are based on the *known* physics of Breeder reactors. GE are building a commercial prototype to test the most efficient and economical build. Then there's the cost effects of the production line. How much does a car cost? Well, that depends if you're buying a hand crafted Rolls Royce or a Daiwoo off a production line! Nukes are moving onto the production line. They'll be quality controlled, safety inspected, mass produced all in a climate controlled factory. Then, when they've passed safety tests, the parts will be trucked to site and clipped together like so much lego. So basically GO AHEAD and criticise older nukes, how expensive they were to build and how expensive to decommission. I'm with you! I don't really want to fly in a 40 year old jumbo jet either. Do you? See, you're bringing up tired old red herrings that just don't apply to today's technologies. You're standing there screaming, "Ban aviation, the Hindenberg CRASHED, don't you get it?!!"

///American business wont touch it without extreme government funding, which tells me it is not a viable solution. The nuclear solution doesn't work at all without massive government intervention to pay all the big bills. ///
Yeah, pull the other one it plays jingle bells. Where did you read that, the toilet wall? Mate, ANY large scale new technology has some government funding behind it. Like this thing we are using now, the internet. Ever hear of government subsidies to that? There have been nukes funded mainly by private business, and please, please, PLEASE tell me you're not uninformed about what's REALLY driving the race towards wind? It's government subsidies. Look, a new age of nuclear power is dawning. You need to read a greater variety of newspaper sources because you're sounding like a parrot.
FACT: There ARE new nukes being approved and built in America.
FACT: Nukes ARE going on the production line, which will see a dramatic drop in cost.
FACT: the Chinese and Indians are racing ahead of us in new reactor types and will probably build commercial GenIV reactors ahead of us. Then they'll probably sell them to us because we were too slow and stupid to prototype our own.
FACT: You don't know who I am!!! You accused me of a growth mindset. "Infinite growth is the philosophy of cancer, why do you want to support that ridiculous idea?" Who said I did? Please read my website and get back to us on that ridiculous character attack.
http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/eclipse/

The funniest thing about your post is it was refuted entirely by the links I posted previously.

All my comments are based on current information, it seems you're reading nuclear industry propaganda as fact again.

Now what I suggest is you fix a nice cuppa and go back and actually read those articles, then go wander around on the websites of the groups building those models and we can start again.

The argument for nuclear is that we will permanently need more and more power indefinitely so we can continue to ignore our future as we have done until recently. So yes, that is supporting infinite growth.

If you dont read, you cant learn. So that's your plan, ignore information that disagrees with your preconceived notions. Genius.

That puts you up there with climate change deniers and religious fanatics. Well done.

I've studied the nuclear industry version and it looks fabbo. Then you start to ask questions about it... and what happened in and after the accidents.... and who paid for everything and who walked away with profits and went quiet....and who is STILL suffering as a result of it.

So do you deny the ongoing suffering of the people and environment of Chernobyl?

Do you deny the ongoing suffering of the people and environment of Fukushima?

Do you deny the irresponsible actions of the nuclear industry at Fukushima?

Can you guarantee me there will not be a repeat of any of those incidents?

What CAN you guarantee the world about the behaviour of this industry?

You're too hooked up in the engineering and not connected to the reality of how these systems work.

You've presented nothing, you've provide only blather.

I have responded to every one of your unfounded assumptions with counter evidence and questions and you have failed to even read them. In return you have stated unfounded assumptions repeatedly as though you are the fount of all knowledge.

Farewell. Until you can provide a coherent response to the issues I've laid out there's no point in communicating further with you.