External Cost of Energy analysis for Sweden now on line: Nuke is lowest.

[NNadir]

Nuclear Power in Sweden has half the external cost of wind power, and half the external cost of biomass.

The external cost of energy is as I once indicated, the cost you pay with your flesh: A quantified cost to health and the environment attributable to forms of energy. These are not the costs you are directly billed.

This surprising result can be found in Table 6.7 on page 106 of the Swedish Implementation of the ExternE program. http://externe.jrc.es/sw.pdf

I will reproduce the costs per kilowatt-hour measured in mECu, Euromills per kilowatt-hour:

Nuclear 0.3 mECu/kw-hr.

Hydro: 2 mECu/kw-hr

Oil: 5.3 mECu/kw-hr

Natural Gas: 2.5 mECu/kw-hr

Coal: 4.7 mECu/kw-hr

Biomass: 0.7 mECu/kw-hr

Wind: 0.7 mECu/kw-hr

Here are some comments:

Please note that these figures apply only in Sweden, and take into account factors that are intrinsically local. Several features are notable.

First, this report dates from the late 1990's. I believe that the performance of wind energy has improved since then, and that this is not taken into account. In most countries wind is competitive in environmental costs with nuclear. I generally assume wind to be superior to nuclear in having lower environmental costs where wind is displacing peak load generation as is generally a reflection of its intermittent nature. If one is backing up wind power with either nuclear or hydro power, I expect wind to be an excellent form of energy, always worth installing.

The impact of hydro is surprisingly high for Sweden. In other countries it is lower and is competitive in environmental terms with nuclear power.

Sweden is unusual in having oil exceed coal in external cost. This is probably transport and import related. Usually coal is the dirtiest possible fuel in most countries.

The report is very detailed in quantifying the costs, exhaustive in fact. One can find, for instance, how NO_x is quantified in incidence of congestive heart failure in this report.

As always, all renewable fuels are superior to all fossil fuels. Therefore this post should not be taken as a knock against renewable energy. Every single renewable energy activity in Sweden saves lives, just as every nuclear facility saves lives. Nuclear power saves more lives, but it will take longer to expand Sweden's nuclear capabilities - and frankly more political rigmarole - than it will take to install renewable capacity.

In the 1980's Sweden's government declared an intention to phase out nuclear power. Since that time there has been a sea change in attitudes to nuclear power both in Sweden and the world in general. I don't think Sweden will be nuclear free in the lifetime of anyone reading this post. The last statement is environmental good news.

[BlueEyedSon]

1. UK just released a study with the price of decommissioning their nukes

it was big money. I wonder if the Sweden nuke costs reflect that and waste disposal ("total cost of ownershp")....

[NNadir]

2. The cost of decomissioning represents 50 years of accumulated cost.

Averaged over 50 years, the decommissioning costs with which everyone is so obsessed are trivial.

If, for instance, one were to say, "It will cost 200 billion dollars" to decommission all of the nuclear facilities in country X or country Y, and either or both countries were producing nuclear power for 50 years, then the annualized costs would actually be 4 billion dollars per year. The United States spends 4 billion dollars on oil imports every few days, and dumps the waste into your lungs. You bear this external cost when you get lung cancer. The pollutants dumped into the air are not decommissioned. You also pay of course for the oil itself, much of this cost being the erosion of your economic health. It is impossible to undo any of this and no effort to do so is even contemplated.

I note in passing that the standards for decommissioning nuclear facilities are arguably absurd: The decommissioning is supposed to essentially zero risk, as if the plants had never existed.

This standard is impossible to meet for any other form of energy. It is not possible for instance to "decommission" the cost of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels for any amount of money.

The anti-nuclear argument depends wholly on throwing around numbers in isolation from time weighted and alternative weighted factors. The ExternE approach is an effort to discard this form of extremely dangerous thinking, thinking which threatens all of humanity and all life on earth.

I invite you to review the report in detail, or to poke around the www.externe.info website to recognize the nature of this calculation, which is exhaustive.

[BlueEyedSon]

3. just sayin, and it aint zero, and it will become a political football here

where corporations externalize every possible cost

[NNadir]

4. So the argument is that being better than all alternatives is not enough.

Because of the intercession of magic, nuclear power must be perfect, and if it's not, we should accept that we do far more dangerous things?

Of course, I am familiar with such thinking. I've been hearing it for years. It's part of the reason that humanity is doomed: the feeling that we should not attempt to mess with irrational approaches to problems since doing so is unpleasant.

[Dead_Parrot]

5. It is one of the nuclear industry's key disadvantages...

Because cleaning up sites and disposing of wastes is actually possible, we get to bear the cost: If we were to remove the excess CO2 from the air and bear that cost - and with existing scrubber tech, ~$200 Trillion is ballpark figure - people might just realise just how cheap nuclear power is.

For some reason, though, most people would rather shit in the bedroom rather than pay for plumbing. Rather disturbing, if you ask me.