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well, I purposedly did not make any references to the Russian vs Western nuclear debate, because I don't think it's relevant to the points I was trying to make.

Which are that:

(i) nukes represent highly concentrated generation sources, and any force majeure event which prevent them from operating (even if there are no risks of nuclear "accidents" as such - an event damaging the high voltage lines coming out of the plant will have the same impact) take out a large fraction of available capacity - backup for such events needs to be available and, if we use that logic used by wind opponents, should be fully charged to such nuclear plant (ie the cost of an EPR should include the cost of a standby 1,600MW gas-fired plant elsewhere in the system)

(ii) force majeure risks can be more dangerous for nukes than for wind farms, and again, in addition to the loss of a large chunk of capacity in one go, present additional safety issues which have a cost - such costs should similarly be added to the cost of nukes.

This is all about consistency of the requirements applied to each technology in their evaluation.

Wind power

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Wed Aug 4th, 2010 at 11:13:41 AM EST
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I say that as someone generally favorable to nukes, when run the French way. I just have a lot of trouble understanding the visceral hostility of so many nuke proponents against wind (not talking about you in particular, as you have been generally precise in your arguments about different technologies)

Wind power
by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Wed Aug 4th, 2010 at 11:15:40 AM EST
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In the US, they are often vying for an artificially constrained defined pool of money, especially under PAYGO rules and the Senate and House committee systems. Under feed-in tariffs, that source of conflict would be gone, but there would still be the others.

They are complementary, of course, in terms of their mutual benefit from long haul transcontinental grid to grid "Electricity Superhighways" but there is enough legacy of conflict that the complementarity on that front cannot be tapped into very easily.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Thu Aug 5th, 2010 at 05:57:34 PM EST
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