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Bill Sacks's avatar

Generally interesting, but one comment on your observation in the sixth bullet that nuclear has high capital costs. It has high UPFRONT capital costs, as do wind turbines and solar panels, but because of nuclear's low operating costs, as you mention, its (much longer) lifetime capital costs are the lowest of any energy source. Moreover, wind/solar get subsidies for their high upfront capital costs in the form both of help from fossil fuels and nuclear for their construction and for backup up their intermittency, as well as government tax credits and cost-plus financing for capacity, regardless of actual energy production. Plus the price of nuclear is boosted by misregulation by the NRC, as well as by litigations and demonstrations by antinuclear NGOs. So both the lowering of the price of wind/solar and the boosting of the price of nuclear are caused by artificial extrinsic influences that are not inherent in either energy source. Thus, LCOE (which is largely extrinsic) is a highly misleading index of renewables versus nuclear, while EROI (which is essentially intrinsic) is far more revealing. The ratio of EROIs between nuclear and renewables is roughly 30 to 1, or much more with more recent reactor designs. And nuclear doesn't suffer from the uncontrollable intermittency of renewables. Nuclear fuel is its own storage, as are fossil fuels, but the latter have negative side effects that require their elimination over time and their replacement by nuclear - but in a planned rather than chaotic way to avoid energy paucities that have their own harmful and even deadly effects.

In considering all the input costs, including materials, land, labor, time, energy, and money (financing), this EROI advantage of nuclear becomes evident. By surveying the ratios between wind/solar and nuclear for each of these inputs it is possible to show that a dollar spent on nuclear will yield something like 50 times as much energy as the same dollar spent on wind/solar. Or conversely, for the same net energy output wind/solar costs roughly 50 times that of nuclear. The factor of 50 is a placeholder to illustrate the two orders of magnitude difference but is difficult to pin down more precisely than that.

All this is explored in a new book by Greg Meyerson and me about to be published soon.

Bill Sacks

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BRIAN CAM's avatar

Meredith was working on saving Vermont Yankee back in the 2010s and a friend suggested that she look into ISO New England and it's consumer board. Don't worry, green grifter Senator markey is working on it. https://www.rtoinsider.com/77872-senators-call-more-transparency-iso-ne/

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