Learning is fun :)

One externality you did not include was the cost of decommisioning different plants and restoring the land. I probably would not have thought about it either, except I talked with a nice man at a swedish environmental NGO. He told me how they had been pushing for all-steel structures (or at least a lot of metal) for wind-power, when swedish concrete giants had wanted to build wind-farm on concrete platforms. The reason for this was that as long as it was fairly pure metals, it would in all probability be worth it to harvest the scrap metal if and when it was decommisioned. Otherwise they might leave concrete plates all over.

Now there was a organisation that was thinking ahead.

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

I have a silly question. Could have looked it up elsewhere, but why be ashamed, right?

Why can you not store electricity?
Do the plants always produce 1-to-1 with the demand?

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government -- Edward Abbey

One of the things that never seems to figure in nuke calculations is that there is no reliable long term storage of high level waste. Currently it's pulled out of reactors and kept in ponds, which is hardly a sustainable long-term solution.

This storage has to stay safe for 100,000 years or so, so it won't be cheap. There are very few places on the planet that are dry enough and stable enough to make reliable storage possible. And the costs of creating inert containers - the current favourite is a copper/steel mix - aren't trivial.

So when decommissioning costs are quoted, it's worth remembering that they don't yet include this long term storage.

One factor which hasn't been considered is the opportunity cost of using natural resources now instead of later. For example, the oil companies have just had a  huge increase in the worth of their reserves because the price of oil has gone up. They did nothing to get this gain other than sitting on their reserves. If, let's say, the price of oil is expected to increase 10% a year they are better off not selling now and waiting for the price to go up. The fact that this is partly politically impossible doesn't mean that it isn't being factored into the oil company's long range plans.

Another way of looking at opportunity cost is that natural hydrocarbons are hard to make and are much more useful as chemical feedstock than as fuel. So by burning them now we can expect higher costs for synthetic materials later.

As non-renewable resources it is also hard to calculate the cost to society after they run out. Currently the way this is handled is exactly backwards. Extraction industries get a tax break for using up natural resources (depletion allowances) instead of being charged for permanently removing them from the commons. Standard economic models always assume substitutes will exist for any commodity. Which implies that the fuel costs of Uranium will rise so that the effective cost per KWh will tend to be the same as with other fuels. The differences in the cost of power generation by technology used are mostly because the marketplace hasn't had a chance to catch up with the new raw material situation.

While no profit making company is going to factor in the opportunity costs or the long range ecological costs when making business decisions, governments can do this via tax and other public policies. Unfortunately there is hardly any real long range planning being done outside of academia. I've coined a new acronym. We have NIMBY (not in my back yard) to express the unwillingness of people to allow new developments. My new one is NIMLT (not in my life time). People are unwilling to make any changes in their lifestyles and push the sacrifices needed into the future.


Policies not Politics
---- Daily Landscape

One of Jerome's recent graphs showed that almost half of the electricity generated was lost in transmission.  We could double the supply of electricity if we could transmit it efficiently, or like Edison, produce it locally.  One of the Edison/Westinghouse DC/AC arguments was that if there was a powerplant in each neighborhood the high losses of transmitting Direct Current electricity would be reduced.

If we had a power plant on every block, and the fuel could be transported more efficiently than electricity, we could double our supply for the same fuel/carbon cost.

Now, who wants this down the block? (Don't all raise your hands at once)