Nuclear Bombshell: $26 Billion cost — $10,800 per kilowatt! — killed Ontario nuclear bid

[bananas]

Nuclear Bombshell: $26 Billion cost — $10,800 per kilowatt! — killed Ontario nuclear bid

We knew new nukes were absurdly expensive (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.”). Now we know they are literally unaffordable.

Our friend and fellow blogger, Tyler Hamilton — who actually has a real job as senior energy reporter for the Toronto Star — published this stunning news in Canada’s largest daily newspaper:

The Ontario government put its nuclear power plans on hold last month because the bid from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., the only “compliant” one received, was more than three times higher than what the province expected to pay, the Star has learned.

Sources close to the bidding, one involved directly in one of the bids, said that adding two next-generation Candu reactors at Darlington generating station would have cost around $26 billion.

It means a single project would have wiped out the province’s nuclear-power expansion budget for the next 20 years, leaving no money for at least two more multibillion-dollar refurbishment projects.

“It’s shockingly high,” said Wesley Stevens, an energy analyst at Navigant Consulting in Toronto.

So nuclear bombshells have now been dropped on Canada, Finland, Turkey (see “Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour“) and this country (see “What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases….”).

Now you may be saying, wait a minute, Joe, hasn’t Areva said it would deliver a single plant for $8 billion, so that should work out to a Walmart-style $16 billion price, rather than AECL’s Tiffany-style offer. Hamilton has more juicy details:

<snip>

[lindisfarne]

1. Yes. When all the real costs of nuclear, including storage of waste,decommissioning,&true liability

costs are included nuclear no longer looks so cheap. Energy companies in the US want to be absolved of liability & decommissioning (storage, once passed on to federal gov. is no longer their headache, either) = so they take massive profits and pass the biggest costs onto the taxpayer.

http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/05/study-cost-risks-new-nuclear-power-plants/
Estimates for new nuclear power place these facilities among the costliest private projects ever undertaken. Utilities promoting new nuclear power assert it is their least costly option. However, independent studies have concluded new nuclear power is not economically competitive.

Given this discrepancy, nuclear’s history of cost overruns, and the fact new generation designs have never been constructed any where, there is a major business risk nuclear power will be more costly than projected. Recent construction cost estimates imply capital costs/kWh (not counting operation or fuel costs) from 17-22 cents/kWh when the nuclear facilities come on-line. Another major business risk is nuclear’s history of construction delays. Delays would run costs higher, risking funding shortfalls. The strain on cash flow is expected to degrade credit ratings.

Generation costs/kWh for new nuclear (including fuel & O&M but not distribution to customers) are likely to be from 25 – 30 cents/kWh. This high cost may destroy the very demand the plant was built to serve. High electric rates may seriously impact utility customers and make nuclear utilities’ service areas noncompetitive with other regions of the U.S. which are developing lower-cost electricity.
=====
Yet the pro-nuke folks keep saying it's the better option.

[madokie]

3. We must never forget the pro-nukers have been lying to us for years now

and that's the only constant here

[lindisfarne]

4. Yes, and now, even costs are being claimed to be trade secrets in attempts to obscure the truth.

In contrast to this transparency, many nuclear promoters have adopted a “Black Box” approach. It has unfortunately been the case over the last couple of years that some utilities have begun to claim that even rudimentary basics of their nuclear cost estimates must be hidden from the public as “trade secrets”. For instance, in the South Carolina Electric & Gas proposal to build two reactors now under consideration by the South Carolina PSC, there is literally a large “box” obscuring the bulk of the calculations in the SC E&G Exhibit which presents the utility’s projection of construction and financing costs for the proposed two-unit facility. In a different case, Duke Energy claimed that it does not even have to disclose its new cost estimates for a proposed nuclear facility in Cherokee County, S.C.. In the Duke case, C. Dukes Scott, South Carolina’s consumer advocate, who represents the public in utility rate cases, noted, “If the cost wasn’t confidential in February,” Scott said, “how is it confidential in April?”

more at http://climateprogress.org/2009/01/05/study-cost-risks-new-nuclear-power-plants/

[NNadir]

5. Oh bull. The fact is that the dumb anti-nuke set is extremely unfamiliar with economics,

the airhead Joe Romm down to the smallest fundie disciple.

The fact is that there are 440 reactors operating on the face of the planet, overlooked by Joe Romm and the other members of his cult. Not one of them cost 26 billion dollars. They all operate right now.

So Joe's theory is that what has already occurred is impossible?

Good luck with that one.

Now let's turn to the fact of intellectual hypocrisy on top of scientific and economic ignorance.

Solar energy - often proposed by people who know zero about energy, couldn't care less about electronic waste and who don't know shit from shinola about reliability, chemistry or risk as an alternative to nuclear - has its costs published by its own industry.

The fact is that the stupid solar fantasy proposed is far more expensive, not there is one dumb fundie anti-nuke who can do comparisons or any kind of math.

This is obvious if one accesses the solar industry's website: www.solarbuzz.com

According to the solar industry (accessed today) solar cells cost 4.56 per "peak watt."

The capacity utilization for the dumb fundie solar industry - by direct measurement of existing systems, on line live is actually just a miserable http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/3/1/703151/-Live,-From-the-Massachusetts-Museum-of-Contemporary-Art:-The-Solar-System">10.6% (The number of dumb fundie anti-nukes who live in the dark 89.4% of the time is ZERO.)

So, to cut to the point, even without the cost of batteries - including the enormous environmental cost - and with no intention to dispose of the electronic waste generated by solar cells about which the anti-nukes couldn't care less - the internal cost of solar for a 1000 MWe plant is 4.54 billion dollars/.106 = $42,000,000,000 dollars.

Again, that's without the batteries, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of metric tons of batteries and their associated waste.

I realize of course that you would need to be able to do math to understand it, but frankly the anti-nuke cults would do anything for the environment except open a Math book.

Basically the anti-nuke cults, from Romm on down, are notorious for their poor grasp of math, economics, physics, chemistry and history.

They are, however, very good at quoting their Bibles.

[lindisfarne]

6. Did you read the link in OP? Also, in your calculations, did you include the actual

storage costs (when not paid by US government) for tens of thousands of years, decommissioning, and so on? I didn't see them listed.

If nuclear is such a smart business opportunity, why did no bid come in with a lower price AND meet the conditions they established?

==== From link in OP: (original article in Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/665644 )
The bid from France’s Areva NP also blew past expectations, sources said. Areva’s bid came in at $23.6 billion, with two 1,600-megawatt reactors costing $7.8 billion and the rest of the plant costing $15.8 billion. It works out to $7,375 per kilowatt, and was based on a similar cost estimate Areva had submitted for a plant proposed in Maryland….

Stevens said Areva’s lower price makes sense because the French company wasn’t prepared to take on as much risk as the government had hoped. This made Areva’s bid non-compliant in the end. Crown-owned AECL, however, complied with Ontario’s risk-sharing requirement but was instructed by the federal government to price this risk into its bid. “Which is why it came out so high,” said Stevens.

Hamilton explains on his blog, Areva “was deemed non-compliant, however, likely because Areva wouldn’t guarantee the price.”
====
So, Areva bids 23.6 billion, which you claim is hugely extravagant, yet Areva refuses to guarantee the price.

Your explanation? Based on your claims, Areva should be making HUGE profits, yet they won't guarantee the price?

[madokie]

10. Big guy don't read links

he is the missing link :rofl: His plan for the nuke waste is for jeebus to come and take him all away from it, all the while calling us bible thumping fundies.:crazy: What a riot he is :rofl:

[Liberation Angel]

13. But they can unrec this issue

I got it ont the greatest page.
It lasted about 2 minutes

Nukes game us again with the great unrec stealth marginalization

[Javaman]

35. nnadir never fails to entertain. nt

[Sirveri]

14. you don't need to store for tens of thousands of years.

Nuclides of concern have half lifes in the 30-35 year range yielding a storage period of 150-350 years. Also the DoE already is in agreement to construct a waste repository to handle the current and projected future load of commercially generated HLW (High level waste). With worldwide oil resource stocks reaching max production potential and natural gas in the US having gone past peak, conventional established baseload generation capabilities are reduced to two realistic choices. Coal and Nuclear. All others are unproven as baseload generation units. While I support research into alternative methods of electrical generation this country will require a stop gap measure to bridge the gap that petroleum products will leave. In addition there is no signifigant production capacity to cater to a widespread deployment of wind and solar options. Finally due to industry lobbyists the choices will once again boil down to coal versus nuclear.

For me the choice is nuclear due to global warming and mountain top removal. For others it is a shit sandwich.

[bananas]

18. No, you have to store it for a million years - EPA requirement, based on NAS report

The National Academy of Sciences said the waste had to be contained for a million years, and the Bush EPA made that a requirement. Your beliefs are based on junk science.
New nuclear is not needed at all, efficiency and renewables can be deployed cheaper and faster than new nuclear.

[Sirveri]

30. EPA requirement is a smokescreen for the real reason.

The real reason they want the waste stored for that long is because after 150-350 years the stuff has become so inert that it can be easily handled. Which is bad because it still contains Pu239 which is weaponisable using a standard PUREX process. So if someone were to grab a bundle of highly aged nuclear waste they could pull the Pu239 out using their bath tub and some chemicals and then sell it or fashion a weapon.

Efficiency can not reduce our consumption needs to zero. Renewables account for less than 1% of current energy demands, this reflects the industrial base that would need to be expanded to signifigantly expand our renewable power generation infrastructure.

I'm not saying it is impossible, I actually would like to see a signifigant expansion of wind and specifically thermal solar. But we also have a government which is owned by their corporate overlords and their wonderful lobbyists. They have given us two choices, coal and nuclear. Nuclear is losing. Have fun with all those new 'clean' coal plants and flattened mountains. Look at the BS the energy secretary is spewing. I am biased towards nuclear because I've worked in the nuclear field and I understand it better than most from an operations standpoint. That doesn't mean I opposse renewable, I however am able to see the writing on the wall. Everything I see says renewables might grow to about 2% while coal takes over the majority of the slack from the closure of oil fired plants.

[bananas]

31. No, it wasn't a "smokescreen".

The EPA wanted a 10,000 year standard and wouldn't change it until they were ordered to by a court in one of the lawsuits over Yucca Mountain. This Slate article has links to the NAS report and the court order: http://www.slate.com/id/2212792/

You're wrong about nuclear being the only choice.
From the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report

In terms of electricity generation, the IPCC envisage that renewable energy can provide 30 to 35% of electricity by 2030 (up from 18% in 2005) at a carbon price of up to US$50/t, and that nuclear power can rise from 16% to 18%. They also warn that higher oil prices might lead to the exploitation of high-carbon alternatives such as oil sands, oil shales, heavy oils, and synthetic fuels from coal and gas, leading to increasing emissions, unless carbon capture and storage technologies are employed.<34>

That was based on economic models using cost estimates for nuclear that we now know were way too low,
it wasn't until the Keystone report came out in June 2007 that we started getting realistic cost estimates,
too late for the IPCC report. If they redid it with the new cost estimates, the percentage nuclear would be much smaller.

Nuclear energy isn't needed at all, and it's more expensive than the alternatives.
Here's what we do globally: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bananas/826
Here's what we do in the U.S.: http://climateprogress.org/2009/02/18/obama-replace-dirty-coal-nuclear-efficency-cogeneration-wind-solar-csp-biomass-cofiring/

[Sirveri]

32. Time will tell. But with the current state of US politics I see coal in the future.

If cost efficiency was all that mattered and the ultimate bottom line, this country would have single payer healthcare. Also Bush would have been impeached alongside Cheney and the whole rotten lot. But that isn't the way things work in this country. Right now we have Congress trying to push through a 'public option' plan, which is probably the only thing that might actually cost more than what we have right now. They do all this because they don't really care about what is best for America, but more what is best for the corporations that give them large sums of money and high paying sofa testing jobs after office.

Mark my words, until NYC is flooded out by global warming and we see oil and nat gas get really expensive we won't see any serious investments into renewables. It will be coal, because they have the strongest lobby. Call me a pessimist, I just don't see anything else happening if we continue with business as usual at the federal level. I'd love to have a strong thermal solar and wind based energy infrastructure since those will allow society to actually have a true stable energy supply. Everything else has a hard limit. Even then society will need to see a dramatic change, cars have to go away because hydrogen fuel cells are nothing more than a pipe dream unless they can figure out a way to remove the platinum from them. My long range societal planning view doesn't forsee nuclear, but I do keep it in my short to mid term view simply because of the ammount of available fuel we have for it along with the addition of the thorium fuel cycle being perfected in India. Cost is relative in all things, the base cost is energy. But we're into the peak oil era, so until all of this works out things might just get interesting.

[kristopher]

37. Oil is less than 2% of current electric generation.

In our grid, most oil fired generation is functionally comparable to natural gas, not coal. That was a response to a previous post but I thought it relevant since you claim that coal will have to pick up the slack from oil plants closing.

You really don't understand the way our system works or the functional characteristics of the technologies involved, so why not follow a plan? Here it is:
Step one: Study the subject a bit.
Step two: Engage in prognostication.

You will almost certainly achieve more accuracy.

[madokie]

20. You want mayonaise on that shit samwich

or do you take it straight?:shrug: In case no one has told you, the lie that is safe nuclear powered electrical energy is dead, graveyard dead.

[Sirveri]

29. tell that to the US Navy and France.

You could tell it to me, but seeing as how I've actually operated a nuclear plant, and studied nuclear accidents using DoE materials (T-7 manual reactor protection and safety) I have a feeling you won't get very far. But if you'd like to make a reasoned scientific arguement I'll happily listen to it.

[madokie]

33. It's easy to be anything one thinks they want to be here on the Internet

The statements, questions and answers one makes over time usually shows the true self.

[Sirveri]

34. Wow really, I had NO idea.

Just being a nuclear operator isn't really that special. Especially if you were one in the US Navy (hence my avatar). It's like being a glorified janitor. But whatever. Still need to read the books and get past the military schooling though.

[bananas]

22. Oh bull. The fact is that the dumb pro-nuke set is extremely unfamiliar with economics,

and only someone out of touch with reality would write "the airhead Joe Romm down to the smallest fundie disciple":

• - Romm is one of the "Top Eight Washington Players on Energy and the Environment" (US News & World Report).
  
• Time magazine named Romm's blog one of the "Top 15 Green Websites"
  
• Rolling Stone magazine named Romm to its list of "100 People Who Are Changing America".
  
• MIT Technology Review wrote that his December 2006 book, Hell and High Water, "provides an accurate summary of what is known about global warming and climate change, a sensible agenda for technology and policy, and a primer on how political disinformation has undermined climate science."
  
• Thomas Friedman, in his column in The New York Times, wrote that Romm is "a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org."
  
• In December 2008, Romm was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
  

As far as the rest of NNadir's post - only someone who doesn't understand economics would try to compare the price of solar panels today with nuclear plants that won't come online for ten years or more (if they aren't cancelled due to construction flaws or cost overruns).

[TheMadMonk]

28. What were the real costs of earlier non-nuclear power generation methods?

Coal even today is considered notoriously dirty. In it's heyday it was incredibly filty. Environmenally disastrous and a killer from the moment we wrested it from the ground till the time it's ash settled in the lungs of a kid in London.

Oil only marginally better than coal in terms of its impact and increasingly expensive to find ways to mitigate that impact.

Hydro has it's own environmental and even greenhouse costs.



Nuclear power is one industry, where fear of consequences has ensured that extreme measures are taken to account for all unforseen costs and potential risks of the technology. Of course it's going to be more expensive than older highly developed methods in which certain impacts (past or present) are discounted or ignored altogether.

A further part of the cost of nuclear energy is that regulatory approval for advanced designs that address a good many of the objections that are valid to some degree or another with respect to existing designs, is essentially non-existent. Instead, increasingly aging infrastructure is propped up, patched and only incrementally upgraded at an ever increasing cost.


Let's start with setting aside for the moment the idea of complete site rehabilitation. Any existing nuclear reactor can be decommissioned by removing it's fuel supply. At that point we have decades to deal with what remains. No matter when we do decommission, this is going to be an issue, and the longer we leave it, the more aged will be the buildings and reactor superstructure, and the less time we will have to make final disposition.

Designs for suitable (or at the very least much less dangerous) replacements ready to be built right now do exist, and the solutions range from rail car sized units suitable for a small town, up to as big as or larger than anything existing. More experimental options offer even more exciting posibilities such as nuclear "incineration" of radioactive waste.

By expanding nuclear power generating capacity to replace greenhouse poluting plants, we at the very least mittigate a known current major environmental threat and can managably defer any impact for a considerable period of time. Long enough in my opinion for economical, industrial scale nuclear incineration to become a reality.

[xchrom]

2. 2-4-6-8 -- NUCLEAR POWER -- AIN'T IT GREAT?!?!

f-u-c-h -- f-u-c-h -- not so much, not so much.

[Ian David]

7. Nuclear energy is free- we have a giant nuclear reactor in the sky.

We should use it.

[lindisfarne]

8. And it's responsible for wind powersolar power, and hydroelectric power. Not geothermal though-

I think that's the earth's doing.
That nuclear reactor is also ultimately responsible for our petroleum & coal-based power as well.

[GliderGuider]

9. For geothermal we can thank the other stars that supplied the material that made the Earth.

If you follow it all back to the beginning, every joule of energy in the universe is a tiny hologram of the Big Bang (minus epsilon for entropy).

[Dogmudgeon]

16. Geothermal energy is produced by nuclear fission

The Earth contains a lot of radioactive material, mainly Uranium and Thorium. As it decays, it generates heat. That heat also drives tectonic movement.

Apparently uranium is about as abundant as tin or zinc, and thorium is 2-3 times as common as uranium.

--d!

[TheCoxwain]

17. I doubt that nuclear reaction is responsible for geothermal energy..

I dont think there is sufficient fissile uranium at the earth core to sustain a long term nuclear reaction ...

remember that natural uranium ( U 235) is far more abundant that U-238 .. and the density difference isnt great enough for U238 to coalesce to critical mass in the molten core ( it has to 'compete' for space with other heavy metals in its density range) ...

It is far more likely that the earth temperature are high because that core retains much of its 'formation' heat from about 3.5 billion years ago ...

think of it ...earth was a molten mass .. the crust cools off and floats on the molten core .. this line of thinking explains many natural observations like continental drift, volcano chains etc.

[SidDithers]

19. I think you've got your Uranium isotopes backwards...

it's the U235 that's fissile. U238 is practically stable, and makes up more than 99% of natural uranium. :hi:

Sid

[TheCoxwain]

21. yup .. my bad .. clearly its been a while ..but I think that does not water my argument down

[bananas]

24. 20% planetary accretion, 80% radioactive decay

Geothermal gradient

The Earth's internal heat comes from a combination of residual heat from planetary accretion (about 20%) and heat produced through radioactive decay (80%).<2> The major heat-producing isotopes in the Earth are potassium-40, uranium-238, uranium-235, and thorium-232.<3>

It's still a trivial amount compared to solar influx:

Earth's energy budget

Incoming energy

The total flux of energy entering the Earth's atmosphere is estimated at 174 petawatts. This flux consists of:

* solar radiation (99.978%, or nearly 174 petawatts; or about 340 W m-2)
o This is equal to the product of the solar constant, about 1,366 watts per square metre, and the area of the Earth's disc as seen from the Sun, about 1.28 × 1014 square metres, averaged over the Earth's surface, which is four times larger. The solar flux averaged over just the sunlit half of the earth's surface is about 680 W m-2
o Note that the solar constant varies (by approximately 0.1% over a solar cycle); and is not known absolutely to within better than about one watt per square metre. Hence the geothermal and tidal contributions are less than the uncertainty in the solar power.

* geothermal energy (0.013%, or about 23 terawatts; or about 0.045 W m-2)
o This is produced by stored heat and heat produced by radioactive decay leaking out of the Earth's interior.

* tidal energy (0.002%, or about 3 terawatts; or about 0.0059 W m-2)
o This is produced by the interaction of the Earth's mass with the gravitational fields of other bodies such as the Moon and Sun.

* waste heat from fossil fuel consumption (about 0.007%, or about 13 terawatts; or about 0.025 W m-2) <1>.

There are other minor sources of energy that are usually ignored in these calculations: accretion of interplanetary dust and solar wind, light from distant stars, the thermal radiation of space. Although these are now known to be negligibly small, this was not always obvious: Joseph Fourier initially thought radiation from deep space was significant when he discussed the earth's energy budget in a paper often cited as the first on the greenhouse effect <2>.

We receive more energy each year from the sun than is stored in all the fissionable fuel underground even using reprocessing and breeder reactors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption">World energy resources and consumption

The estimates of remaining worldwide energy resources vary, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 0.4 YJ (1 YJ = 1024J) and the available nuclear fuel such as uranium exceeding 2.5 YJ. Fossil fuels range from 0.6-3 YJ if estimates of reserves of methane clathrates are accurate and become technically extractable. Mostly thanks to the Sun, the world also has a renewable usable energy flux that exceeds 120 PW (8,000 times 2004 total usage), or 3.8 YJ/yr, dwarfing all non-renewable resources.

When you look at how quickly we're burning through 0.4 YJ of fossil fuels, 2.5 YJ of nuclear fuel isn't going to last long, and that's assuming we can get breeder reactors to work reliably and economically. Without breeder reactors, it isn't even worth the trouble.

[Liberation Angel]

11. K&R and into the greatest page -- let's see if the unrec does it in

keep your head down

they're coming

Great post btw!

[Liberation Angel]

12. UNWRECKER strikes again OFF Greatest page! Damn BUT see this:

Bad Nukes: Washington Monthly article (good analysis of the problems and the failures of nuke energy and the lies)

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.blake.html

[bananas]

23. Only a shill would unrec this thread - they want to hide the true costs.

They do this all the time - they try hide all the problems with nuclear energy.
There are so many problems:
- cost
- construction time
- insurance liability
- risk of accidents
- waste storage
- mining and enrichment issues
- proliferation risks
- etc etc

[bananas]

25. They've got it down to three recs - they are really afraid of this information!

They do NOT want people knowing about this!

[madokie]

26. It fits with the way it's been with the nuke crowd from the get go

obfuscate and outright lying is their mo, alway has been. We stopped a nuke plant in my back yard years ago and I'm ready to work at doing the same once again if need be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Fox_Nuclear_Power_Plant

http://www.ecn.cz/temelin/CARRIE.HTM

[Liberation Angel]

27. 3 recs is their goal

that's what my posts get and it stays there


this sucks

[girl gone mad]

15. No surprise.

With costs such as the one outlined in the article below, nuclear is simply not competitive. It would probably be cheaper to move households off of the grid using small wind turbines or solar panels, and promote conservation and the use of energy efficient appliances than to keep propping up the nuclear industry.

Samurai-Sword Maker's Reactor Monopoly May Cool Nuclear Revival

March 13 (Bloomberg) -- From a windswept corner of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, Japan Steel Works Ltd. controls the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance.

There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak.

Utilities that won't need the equipment for years are making $100 million down payments now on components Japan Steel makes from 600-ton ingots. Each year the Tokyo-based company can turn out just four of the steel forgings that contain the radioactivity in a nuclear reactor. Even after it doubles capacity in the next two years, there won't be enough production to meet building plans.

``If there are 50 to 100 reactors or more to be built, there will be a real shortage and real delays in deliveries, so it's a good hedge to get in line now,'' said Ron Pitts, senior vice president for nuclear operations at the construction and engineering company Fluor Corp. in Irving, Texas.

Pitts estimated the cost of heavy forgings, including reactor containment vessels, steam generators and pressurizers, at $300 million to $350 million for each generating unit. Japan Steel wouldn't comment on the size of the down payment, which Pitts estimated at $100 million.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aaVMzCTMz3ms

[DiamondJoe]

36. Who knows the price? - nobody yet

I was getting flyer's on my door step from the nay-saying nuclear pundints (Clean Air Alliance) long before AECL/Candu made their pitch. On the flyer it claimed in bold 'Don't give the nuclear industry a 26 billion cheque". So perhaps that is where Tyler Hamilton got the figure but regardless of what the real bid was/is - the Ontario government - should they continue to waiver on the decision - will have a very large price tag. Much ado has been made with the Federal government selling off assets of ACEL. The uncertainty surrounding that reality, coupled with lobbies on both sides of the nuclear fence, the relatively new green legislation offered incentives for wind, solar and other renewables, the debate will rage on. I do think they'll revisit the nuclear option given that was part of the plan to support the grid while they phase out coal, and build up renewables. Stay tuned.