Re: theWatt Podcast 75

I am not really sure why I am spending so much time in an argument about wind. It is just a minor distraction since the real competition for atomic fission energy systems is fossil fuel combustion systems. Even after thousands of years of effort, the amount of power produced by wind is a tiny fraction of 1% of the world's primary energy supply. It has experienced some recent fast growth, but that has largely been the result of mandates, subsidies and clever marketing by companies like General Electric (GE) - which supplies nearly 50% of the US market for turbines.

For all exponential growth systems, there are many factors that eventually limit the growth to a much smaller rate.

With wind, grid stability is only one factor that may come into play, but it is probably the least of the worries. Well before you hit a limit of grid stability, you will run into turbine availability, availability of good sites, local opposition, transmission system interconnection limits, material availability, lack of adequate cranes, lack of physical access to sites, dissatisfaction with the rate of return, etc.

You mentioned the "subsidy" that nuclear gets from "insurance and waste cleanup". Can you tell me just how much the insurance has cost the taxpayers? In the UK, there is a pretty large projected cleanup bill, but a major portion of that bill is for weapons complex cleanup, and is not strictly related to power production.

In the US, the waste costs for nuclear power production systems are all internalized - they are covered by the revenues associated with the sale of electricity. The market value of the electricity produced by a nominal 1000 MWe nuclear power plant in the US last year was nearly $500 Million (90% CF, market price of electricity of $60 per MW). Those plants paid a huge tax bill, contributed nearly $8 million each to a permanent used fuel fund, paid for all of the costs of packaging, transporting and storing low level waste, paid excellent salaries for 500-800 permanent workers, supplied reliable, emission free energy for about a million people, and paid their own insurance bill up to the legal limit. NONE of them has ever made a claim against the "subsidized" insurance system.

Now tell me how the competitive fossil fuel industry handles its deadly waste.

BTW - if you want to see an exponential rate of growth, take a look at the curves related to the production of electricity by nuclear power plants in the world in the period from 1973-1996 and then think about what the people in the marketing departments at major oil companies, coal companies, railroad companies focused on transporting coal, and government completely dependent on fossil fuel sales were doing as they watched that rapidly expanding competition.