Business Week: Nuclear Power's Missing Fuel

[bananas]

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2006/tc20060628_463853.htm

JUNE 29, 2006
Technology
By Adam Aston

Nuclear Power's Missing Fuel
Why Wall Street is skeptical of backing a new round of proposed nuke plants

<snip>

It's a nuclear renaissance, right? Not yet. While smart money is placing multibillion-dollar bets on ethanol, wind power, and solar, it's not throwing buckets of cash at nukes. "The real obstacle isn't the Sierra Club but the 28-year-old analysts on Wall Street," says Bob Simon, Democratic staff director of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

<snip>

This time around, the industry is aiming to build new plants for $1,500 to $2,000 per kilowatt of capacity, compared with a peak, inflation-adjusted cost of about $4,000 in the 1970s.

Trouble is, the cheapest plants built recently, all outside the U.S., have cost more than $2,000 per kilowatt. And the advanced designs now on U.S. drawing boards have never been built here. "A first-of-its-kind facility always costs more," says John Kennedy, a director at Standard &Poor's.

<snip>

Last year's Energy Act dangled $13 billion worth of extra treats before the nuclear industry <snip>
Yet all that still may not "provide a sufficient incentive to pursue new construction," says Kennedy.

<snip>

[WyLoochka]

1. Good - keep the nukes out

Nuclear energy is a tremendously expensive way to generate electricity. It is a government subsidy (welfare) hog. And then there is the extreme risk of catastrophe, for which our tax dollars have to buy the insurance, because no private insurer will go anywhere near that risk. And then there are the waste storage problems.

So let's make sure the "small government" fanatics do not up the ante with higher incentive (bribe/welfare) money to start building more of these dangerous, wasteful monsters.

If they would put some money into fusion research, perhaps that could be accomplished someday. It would be safer and cheaper.

[jpak]

2. $13 billion in CheneyBucks for 6 new nukes - and no takers???

pshaw!

In the meantime, 22 blue and purple states have established Renewable Portfolio Standards that will develop 27,000 MW of new renewable electricity capacity by 2017 - and they didn't need any CheneyBucks to do it.

Green Energy trumps Nukes...

gotta love it

:)

Oh yeah, did I mention that Finland's new loss-leader nuclear power plant is 1 year into construction and 9+ months behind schedule - already?????