Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Nuclear power, costs and Florida Power and Light ... by gimleteye

I discovered an excellent blog, Climate Progress, that includes the following of interest:

"New nuclear power plants are currently far and away the most expensive form of carbon free power you can (try to) buy — assuming you could find a nuclear vendor today that was actually willing to guarantee a price for their product in a Public Utility Commission hearing, which you can’t. (click 'read more')
Indeed, the French government-owned nuclear giant, Areva threatened work stoppage in late summer at the Finnish nuke they were building over who would pay for cost overruns. Areva had made clear in May it wasn’t going to keep swallowing the price escalation risk — see “Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns.”

The most detailed independent cost estimate of nuclear power published this year — here on Climate Progress by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“) — puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates!"

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