This should be a wake-up call to the pro-nuclear club that substantial R&D investments are being made in advanced alternative designs never thought possible before. Large central nuclear plants will end up sharing the grid in the future with many other forms of small-scale generators.

The answer appears to be yes based on my search...although I was hoping to get a response from an expert in energy economics on this blog.

Reasonable capital cost recovery factors are between .115 and .15 giving a cost of money of about $5 billion for the first ten years of the nuclear plant financing. About the same as the total capital cost.

This amount of money, instead of being wasted, could be directed toward any number of 'local economy' DG solutions having a payback of only a few years in all cases and an average installed cost of about $2,000 per KW. The $5 billion investment would generate 160 billion kWh over eight years, before the nuke could even begin generating, for less than 6 cents per kWh. 160 billion kWh is what the nuke plant would be expected to generate in 20 years, but only after it actually gets started.

Not taken into account are facts such as: DG allows for heat recovery...deduct that from the production cost of the DG electricity.

With DG no transmission is required...allow for at least 2.5 cents per kWh in avoided associated electrical costs.

Instead of to Hitachi, Toshiba and Areva the $5 billion would go into local economies and family farms.

The cost of a nuclear power plant has risen to $8 billion today not $5 billion. They are too expensive to build ! The IAEA has shown that nuclear power rates are the highest at $0.14- 0.16/kw-hr. Dr. Chu, Secy of DOE has stated that no more commercial nuclear waste will go to Yucca Mtn depository. It is already 75% committed to Government nuclear waste. As an ex-nuclear engineer, I know nuclear's "dirty secrets". Let me put the final nail in the nuclear coffin. A GE report has shown that the profit in nuclear power is only 3% over its 25 year amortization cost. The only reason the nuclear plants were originally built was the direct and indirect Government subsidies. The cost for dismantling these nuclear "dinosaurs" will be in the $ billions and passed on to the rate-payers. Eighteen European nations have voted to ban, stop construction or dismantle nuclear power plants. No, nuclear is not the answer.

After reading your post above I think professor Banks, who publishes articles and comments on this website regularly in support of nuclear, should pay close attention to what you are saying. Here in Ontario our regulated rates are presently in the 6 to 7 cents per kwhr range, which is considered pretty low. Over half our generator fleet is presently in nuclear plants, but our rates were heavily subsidized in the past when our nuclear fleet was built. On top of basic rates, Ontarians have now been saddled with extra “debt retirement” payments charged to everyone's monthly electricity bills since several years ago – specifically to pay down the massive multi-billion dollar stranded debt the old Ontario Hydro built up in part from building our nuclear fleet. So I tend to believe your claims above very much so.

I would like to suggest that this conflict is specious. The issue is not DG/renewable vs. nuclear. It's DG/renewable AND nuclear vs. coal. Because (ignoring CO2 emissions and coal's pollutants in general) coal is far cheaper than either of these two. Which means, in our cost-conscious world civilization, coal will win, the climate be damned.

The reasons nuclear is more expensive than coal are political and organizational, not technical. The reason DG is more expensive than coal are technical, at least at present. Say what you want about nuclear waste and uranium mining, etc., but that's a far more bounded problem than climate change. DG/renewable doesn't have a ghost of a chance of displacing coal in the next 25 years. Nuclear can, and should. Maybe after that, renewables will be ready to replace nuclear.

Some numbers to ponder for Ontario.

A 3kW system can be installed and connected to the local grid with off-the-shelf equipment for about 30,000 Canadian dollars, less if you can install it yourself. This amount of power should provide an average homeowner about one third of their household energy consumption, and at 80 cents/kWhr that Ontario is proposing to pay for 20 years, it should generate on average across the year about $7 per day, or about $2500/year. This average takes into account that on summer days it will make much more than $7/day, and in winter much less if anything at all.

At $2500/year it will take only 12 years to pay off the system, and from then on it’s all gravy. And with the advances in solar like morgansolar.com is poised to market, and with falling equipment costs every year, that 12 years is shrinking.

No doubt if there is a huge take up of rooftop solar in Ontario after the first few years, they will probably scale back the 80-cent offer to something lower for new ones, but by then costs will have also come down. It's no longer unthinkable that we could see several hundred thousand rooftop solar systems in Ontario within 5 to 10 years.

I really think Malcolm should reconsider his refusal to believe in solar when some of his neighbors are padding their bank accounts doing nothing but letting the sun shine, and probably working somewhere else at some day job earning a regular income. BTW I checked and implementing a rooftop solar system to sell back into the grid will definitely be considered by the Canada Revenue Agency to be a small business operation with all the income tax deduction incentives enjoyed by a commercial business.

Now consider if you have a large enough roof to install a 10kW system, and back it up with a few days or more of storage. That one third of an average homeowner's consumption triples to virtually all of their needs. And the size of a roof necessary for a given power output will shrink if more efficient solar being developed emerges.

By the way, if you think that the Finns are a little 'off', try visiting Finland this summer, and then take a cruise ship over to Stockholm.

Also, I think that you know even better than I do that in the long run almost all nuclear fuel will be reprocessed, and so you can store it in your basement, and all new reactors will be breeders. I don't like this at all, to put it mildly, but the voters are going to insist. I just hope that they don't forget to put a reinforced ranger company around every plant, and not deal with security issues the way that the Swedes will probably do: a guy sitting at a guard shack with a mobile telephone and a copy of a book called 'Relations', telling him or her how to talk to nutters.

By your own numbers, it would take $90,000 ($30,000 x 3) to provide the power for one home. This compares with a nuclear power plant (1500 MW) that can power about 1,500,000 homes. To equate the costs, that would correspond to a $135 Billion power plant. Much more expensive that anyone has ever suggested for nuclear power, even under pessimistic circumstances.

It's great that Ontario is willing to pay 80 cents per kw-hr, but that's an unsustainable rate for large amounts of power.

Nuclear plants today are breathtakingly expensive – to the point where you are playing “you-bet-your-company” to build one. However, I suspect that over the long haul, the plants will again be good deals … if we can find enough money to build them.

Seems to me that while Distributed Generation is pretty pricey, the financial risk is much less than nuclear power because if a particular unit turns out to be not so good, the amount of money involved is not that high. Easier to write-off a few million in taxpayer money, although it is obviously better if the technology ultimately turns out to be reasonably cost effective.

Solar is still and was never expected to supply 100% of a home's energy needs 100% of the time. The point is once the system is paid off with the 80 cents/kwhr, one third of a home's energy is virtually free from then on. The other two thirds obviously comes from the grid. That's a very attractive consumer deal in my books. Maybe not yours, but then saving money isn't on every one's mind either.

And what Banks refuses to have any faith in are the heroic engineers that are working steadily on shrinking that $30,000. Again I refer to the MorganSolar.com people about to dramatically lower it. And besides new emerging technologies, that $30,000 is just one company's prices in Ontario, there are others emerging that will drive it lower just from plain old competition - another novel concept in the ignorant minds of some economists. link Banks

And finally, that $30,000 figure is to RETROFIT and existing house. Building it into a brand new house costs considerably LESS right now.

-Bob

And I know that I can do this, and eventually will, but why should I hurry. The bloggosphere has cheaped both the written and spoken word (or symbol) to an extent that my humble efforts on this front are not particularly useful. It's quite clear to me that the utility of nuclear energy IN THE LONG RUN is so great that governments should make it their business to subsidize them, but instead of doing that they become involved in senseless wars in stone age countries.

Jim, More points to consider. The $30,000 price I’m discussing is the retail price charged by a small Ontario company to install it and make a substantial mark-up profit on the equipment and labor. The bare equipment for a 3kW system costs far less than $30k, and it doesn't scale linearly either meaning a 10kW system is very roughly more like twice the cost of a 3kW system, not 3 times.

Now a company dealing in much higher volumes of systems would lower equipment costs by factors of 2 or 3 times, which is typical volume price reductions for hardware when you scale up from dozens of units per year to thousands per year. This is definitely the case for the inverter and other electronic gear that must interface the system to feed back into the grid.

An emerging technology like MorganSolar.com has the potential to offer a 3kW system for $5000 or less wholesale. And who knows what price is possible should they get into volumes of thousands of systems per year. If it reaches near $1500 per kW, nuclear and other large central generators will have serious competition, and also remember distributed rooftop generators don't require expensive long-haul high-voltage transmission lines.

Of course I agree 80-cents/kwhr for rooftop solar being offered here is unsustainable, but as costs come down, Ontario will surely lower this until is becomes no longer subsidized, and is exactly what the Ontario government is gambling on in the long run.

The reactor is self-regulating by load; if the electical load drops, less heat is withdrawn, causing the core to heat up and expand. The expansion reduces the reaction rate to match the heat withdrawal rate. Rather a neat system! The fuel cycle, however, is still based on "ordinary" fission. It has a very high burnup ratio, transmuting non-fissile U-238 or Thorium into fissile plutonium or U-233. It's projected to run for 30 years without refueling.

I'm not at all clear on the differences between Toshiba's design and Hyperion's. They seem very similar in concept, but doubtless have major differences in detail.

Regarding Morgan Solar and their "breakthrough" in concentrated photo-voltaics (CPV), I'm taking a "wait and see". I've read what's on their web sited, as well as articles in Technology Review from MIT that seem to be about the same approach using dyes mixed into transparent plastics. It may be "real" and workable, but I doubt very much that its performance is a match for the hype. Whether it will achieve a significant reduction in cost / installed kilowatt of capacity remains to be seen. Since it requires tracking mounts, it can't be installed cheaply on rooftops. That means it's starting with a big disadvantage. Even if the solar panels themselves were free, I suspect that the cost of the tracking mounts would render the final system costs not much less than "conventional" PV.

But I'd love to be proven wrong.

The third generation solid oxide fuel cells are doing well too. VERSA Power has, through the government's SECA program reduced the cost of manufacturing solid oxide fuel cells (in volume) to $700 per kW and anticipates this cost will decline to $400 per kW next year. Their fuel cells uses the same electrolyte as that of Bloom Energy but Bloom has far better public relations than VERSA Power.