Title says it all.
Olmedilla Photovoltaic Park |
Ulchin No. 6 |
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| Location | Olmedilla de Alarcón, Spain | Uljin, South Korea |
| Type | Silicon photovoltaic (PV) | Pressurized light-water reactor (PWR) |
| Year | 2008 | 2005 |
| Capacity | 60 MWe | 1,001 MWe |
| Actual generation | 88 GWh / year (10 MWe) |
8,108 GWh / year (923 MWe) |
| Capacity factor | 0.17 | 0.92 |
| Total Cost (USD) | $0.54 billion | $1.76 billion |
| Cost / "Watt" of capacity | $8.95 / Wp | $1.76 / Wp |
| Cost / Watt of actual power generation | $53.77 / W | $1.91 / W | Construction time | 16 months (1.3 y) | 55 months (4.6 y) |
For clarity, by "capacity factor" I mean the straight ratio of average power generation to the rated power. E.g., for the Ulchin-6 capacity factor, using the 2008 generation figure and the net power rating:
8108 GWh / 366 days / 1001 MW = 92.2%
(NB 2008 was a leap year).
Sources:
IAEA | Nuclear Power Reactor Details | ULCHIN-6
IAEA | Operating Experience History | ULCHIN-6
MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research | Update on the Cost of Nuclear Power (pdf page 45)
Korea Hydro & Nuclear | OPR-1000 (photo)
Scientific American | The World's 10 Largest Renewable Energy Projects
Nobesol | Olmedilla de Alarcón
Wow, no clean up or mitigation costs or insurance? How much does Nuke plant insurance cost? In the US, zero since it would make running a Nuke plant too expensive so the govt pays for it. What do the clean up costs run? In the US, zero because they are so expensive it would be too expensive to run a Nuke plant if the investors paid for that, so the rate payers and the govt cover those costs.
ReplyDeleteYou forgot to count construction, mining, and decommissioning costs for the nuclear plant. They drive it's figures up. A lot.
ReplyDeleteWhile I am sure that the numbers are correct, the current construction cost for solar is about half what is shown here. Are decommissioning costs included in the nuclear plant's operating costs?
ReplyDeleteNuclear plants require fuel delivery and disposal. If you include the cost to mine, transport and enrich uranium, and also the responsibility store it for millenia, I think you'll find the cost comparison quite different.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you are comparing a relatively mature technology with an infant technology that has yet to achieve any real economy of scale.
Some comparison of running costs would be good too. PV arrays are very passive/low on moving parts, and the fuel arrives out of the sky each day for free, so the longer the PV plant runs, the better value it becomes.
PV is an expensive technology now, however, the cost of silicon is rapidly decreasing. Also, concentrated solar thermal is cheaper than nukes.
ReplyDelete"How much does Nuke plant insurance cost?"
ReplyDeleteDecimal dust.
"In the US, zero since it would make running a Nuke plant too expensive so the govt pays for it."
Utter nonsense. Nuclear reactors are the only power plants in the US that have any kind of insurance.
They must have insurance for damages up to $300 million. The industry is collectively liable for all damages between $300 million and $10 billion.
Damages higher than $10 billion are possible on paper if you make several compounded cautious assumptions. That's not being cautious, that's just being wrong.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the subsidy of having no liability for damages exceeding $10 billion per year at $600 000 per reactor. That's peanuts.
Coal power has no global warming insurance or liability. Coal plants have no liability for the routine deaths of 30 000 people per year from particulate pollution(EPA numbers). At the same rate of $5 million per death as used by the CBO study I quoted above that's a $150 billion subsidy(240 million per coal plant per year). If the LNT hypothesis is true, this is equivalent to 3 times the people who will ever die from the Chernobyl disaster(if the LNT hypothesis is false, this is up to 500 Chernobyls per year based on the 56 known deaths).
Neither gas pipelines nor liquified or pressurized petroleum gas are required to have insurance. Accidents are both spectacular and routine.
Gas turbines have no liability for the deaths caused by their particulate emissions(pressumably far less than coal, but I can't find any studies). They have no liability for their CO2 emissions.
Dams are not required to have insurance or liability for dam breaks(the greatest industrial disaster in history by a large margin was the banqiao dam disaster, an irrigation and hydroelectric dam that burst, destroying 6 million buildings, displacing 11 million people, killing 26 000 directly and 145 000 indirectly from famine and disease).
PV is not required to have insurance for people falling off their roof while installing them. You might thing this is reaching, but when you divide the number of deaths from such accidents by the pitiful amount of energy they generate it's roughly equivalent to the deaths in the civilian nuclear sector, including Chernobyl unit 4 with the LNTH estimate of 9000 eventual deaths.
Wind energy is not required to have any insurance against deaths caused by flying ice chunks, construction accidents etc.
Above all else, wind and solar energy is not required to have any insurance against the collapse of the energy grid and the deaths of millions as a result. Wind and solar cannot operate without back-up or gobsmackingly huge amounts of storage. If you double down on solar and wind energy and do not manage to replace natural gas with sufficient electrical storage by the time natural gas starts to seriously decline, the electrical grid can now only operate intermittently at a high rate of wear. Extricating yourself from that situation would take decades.
"What do the clean up costs run?"
The same as a coal plant, except coal plants are not required to clean up.
"You forgot to count construction, mining, and decommissioning costs for the nuclear plant. They drive it's figures up. A lot."
ReplyDeleteCan't you read? Those are levelized life-cycle costs. That means fuel, operating costs, construction costs, interest, license application cost, the works.
"PV is an expensive technology now, however, the cost of silicon is rapidly decreasing."
ReplyDeleteThat's the mantra, but reality is very different.
The reality is that creating a slice of silicon is very mature technology and the price of bog-standard poly-si PV has approximately halved over the last two decades. This was driven mostly by efficiency improvements and minor process improvements here and there, which have now more or less petered out for single-junction poly-si. Creating a slice of silicon is time consuming and energy intensive, and it's very likely to remain that way forever.
The real cost of PV is not so much the cost of capacity as much as it is in mitigating variability on all different time-scales(weather, day and night cycle, seasonal variation). The typical way to do this is to burn natural gas, which explains why solar is attached at the hip to natural gas.
"Also, concentrated solar thermal is cheaper than nukes."
I've seen solar propents make noises to that effect, but it invariably turns out that they do not understand capacity factors(1 watt of solar thermal produces only 0.2 W of energy on average, where as 1 W of nuclear produces 0.9 W on average.), do not take into account interest, do not take into account long power-lines stretching into the middle of nowhere(if you look at your electrical bill I think you will find that distribution is a bigger cost than generation. Nuclear is at an advantage since it can go where the powerlines are instead of where the sun is, and it has a higher capacity factor, so using the lines more effectively).
UVDIV, I like what you have on your blog, I'll be adding it to my blog roster. You've done a great job of taking advantage of the wide format with these tables.
ReplyDeleteIf it was possible to improve upon this direct comparison, I might add the amount of land occupied. Also, footnoting the cost figures' scope so they aren't targeted in the usual manner.
Very good work!
This ought to be translated into Spanish as well, they need to read this.
ReplyDeleteSolar energy is the best natural resource that we have this time even more that fuel is too expensive. In fact i want to approach costa rica investment opportunities and look all the alternative this country can have because it climate. We must to find the way to save our planet and to use solar energy could be the first step.
ReplyDeleteDecommission costs are estimated to be about $500M, from the research I have done. You also won't see these prices for nuclear in the red-tape happy US. All this changes the number, but nuclear is still far more cost effective.
ReplyDelete