Danish electricity prices are the highest in Europe, Germany's rising rapidly.

[NNadir]

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php?title=File:Electricity_and_gas_prices_(including_taxes),_as_of_1_January(EUR).PNG&filetimestamp=20090430100059#file">What a surpirse, German electricity prices follow gas.

[kristopher]

1. Well, it could be worse...

THE ECONOMICS OF NUCLEAR REACTORS: RENAISSANCE OR RELAPSE?

MARK COOPER
SENIOR FELLOW FOR ECONOMIC ANALYSIS
INSTITUTE FOR ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT
VERMONT LAW SCHOOL


Conclusion:

Policymakers should refuse to allow taxpayers and ratepayers to be put at risk. If nuclear reactors cannot stand on their own in the marketplace, they should not be propped up by subsidies.

This analysis has shown that there is a range of alternatives that can meet the need for electricity at a lower cost and with a more benign environmental impact. The aspiration of the nuclear enthusiasts symbolized in the first MIT report has become desperation in the second MIT report precisely because their cost estimates do not comport with reality. Notwithstanding their hope and hype, nuclear reactors are not economically competitive and would require massive subsidies to force them into the supply mix. It was only by ignoring the full range of alternatives -- above all efficiency and renewables -- that the MIT studies could predict a feasible economic future for nuclear reactors. Today the analytic environment has changed from the early days of the great bandwagon market, so that it is much more difficult get away with the "systematic confusion of expectation with fact, of hope with reality."

The highly touted nuclear renaissance is based on fiction, not fact. It garnered a significant part of its traction in the early 2000s with a series of cost projections that vastly understated the direct costs of nuclear reactors. As those early cost estimates fell by the wayside and the extremely high direct costs of nuclear reactors became apparent, advocates for nuclear power turned to climate change as the rationale to offset the high cost. But introducing environmental externalities does not resuscitate the nuclear option for two reasons. First, consideration of externalities improves the prospects of non-fossil, non-nuclear options to respond to climate change. Second, introducing externalities so prominently into the analysis highlights nuclear power’s own environmental and external problems. Even with climate change policy looming, nuclear power cannot compete in the marketplace, so its advocates are forced to seek to prop it up by shifting costs and risks to ratepayers and taxpayers.

The massive shift of costs necessary to render nuclear barely competitive with the most expensive alternatives, and the huge amount of leverage (figurative and literal) that is necessary to make nuclear power palatable to Wall Street and ratepayers is simply not worth it. The burden will fall on taxpayers. Policymakers, regulators, and the public should turn their attention to and put their resources behind the lower-cost, more environmentally benign alternatives that are available. If nuclear power’s time ever comes, it will be far in the future -- after the potential of the superior alternatives available today has been exhausted.

[NNadir]

3. Another oblivious anti-nuke citing another anti-nuke's ignorance over and over and over.

The circle jerk of anti-nukes citing one another over and over and over and over and over doesn't make anything they say true, any more than Pat Robertson citing other creationists makes creationism true.

The electricity rates of France vs. Denmark speak for themselves.

[hobbit709]

2. Note that it states including taxes.

That might be what makes it higher.

[NNadir]

4. Maybe paying huge subsidies to worthless and unreliable forms of energy requires taxes.

Without it's huge investment in oil and gas offshore - Denmark's energy system would be bankrupt.

As it is, it is forced to dump electricity from Western Denmark at off peak hours - like the dead of night - at below cost because it's not available when needed, and floods the grid when it isn't needed.

[Fledermaus]

5. good