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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

"What makes a difference in Georgia is that the state has ruled that customers are going to have to pay, he said."

Not taxpayers. Subsidies have actually been going to wind and solar for quite a few decades (see Solyndra) - not to nuclear.

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"The project at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Ga., is being undertaken by Southern Co., which operates four electric utilities in the South, and three minority partners — all aided by a massive federal loan guarantee and other incentives."

So yes federal taxpayers are paying for this too. Loan guarantees are not free. By the way, the loan guarantee for just these two nuclear reactors will be 8.3 billion which dwarfs the half a billion dollar Solyndra loan guarantee everyone is complaining about.

Unfortunately, nuclear subsidies in the US dwarf the very few incentives we have for renewable power. Almost the entire budget of the Department of Energy is devoted to supporting nuclear in one way or another.

Edit:

This is the link showing the amount of the loan guarantee:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/energy-environmen...

I would think a loan guarantee would only have a cost if the utility defaulted on the loan. The taxpayers are in effect co-signing.

Unfortunately the history of nuclear generating station construction is one of massive cost overruns and defaults. I wish I felt more confident that things would be different this time.

Regardless, I think this is welcome news, demand for electricity is only going to grow especially as electric vehicles start to become viable.

> loan guarantee would only have a cost if the utility defaulted

But loan guarantee does have a cost -- it is risk the taken on by the tax payer. The value of that risk is how much the loan guarantee would cost if purchased on the free market.

I have good credit, would you co-sign a car loan for me for free?

No?

How much would I have to pay you to make it worth co-signing?

That's the value of the loan guarantee to you.

The value to me is how much I save on interest due to your guarantee. Or, if I can't buy a car without your signature, the value to me is the difference between the value of owning a car vs. not owning one.

The loan guarantee is actually against government induced project delays not default. The goal is to make the government a stakeholder. The last two built at that same site had > 10x cost overruns for that reason.

If people are steeling themselves for high electricity bills, then why not focus on renewables where the current technology is improving very quickly? When the amazing thorium reactors show up I'll reconsider, but until then... why be willing to pay big for nuclear?

I would assume (though I'm not fully up to date) that the so-called "safer" reactor designs such as high-temperature gas cooled, pebble-bed, or thorium reactors are still pretty much research projects. They are likely at least a decade or more away from commercial scale feasibility.

You're mostly right, with a couple of exceptions:

1. China is working on a mass-producible pebble bed reactor, the 100 MWe HTR-PM. The first pair of them are under construction, and are scheduled to start commercial operation in 2015.

2. It's possible to run existing pressurized light water reactors on a fuel mix consisting mostly of thorium. This has nothing to do with the capital costs of construction, but if uranium ever gets a lot more expensive, it could be a very useful option.

One exception is the Integral Fast Reactor, which was near production-ready when Clinton cancelled the program in 1994. GE-Hitachi has a similar design called the PRISM which has been approved by the NRC for a full-scale demo reactor. GE is trying to sell it to the UK to burn up their plutonium stockpiles.

In the IFR tests at Argonne, researchers cut off the cooling system entirely, and the reactor just quietly shut down, with no damage.

A great new book on the IFR is Plentiful Energy by Till and Chang, two senior scientists at the Argonne project.

Nuclear seems to be our only option for the time being; most renewables require TONS of space to be comparable (not to mention problems with electricity production vs. demand management in the grid - solar and wind energy kind of depends on weather). There's a good book on the topic that has all the relevant calculations: http://www.withouthotair.com/

The fact that renewable energy technology is improving is kind of irrelevant — you don't retroactively get all that progress if you purchase now, just like your nuclear reactor won't suddenly be thorium-based once that technology is worked out. You have to choose based on what's actually available. As things stand, AFAIK no renewable power source is more economical than nuclear. Hopefully they will be in the future, but building the current, inferior implementation because one day there will be a better version doesn't make sense. That's like putting a 2-year-old on the Olympic weightlifting team because he seems likely to be very strong one day.

You think nuclear is cheaper than renewables?

Not sure what you're getting at with the "retroactively" bit. What I mean is renewables are feasible now, and next year they will be appreciably better, and the year after that even more so... this is not a pace of improvement I see in nuclear power, and yet I am supposed to be amazed by its price (cough) and potential (irrelevant since reactors are built to last 50 years; renewable stuff can be upgraded far more easily, in pieces)

What renewable energy source are you thinking of as "feasible now" at a scale of 1000 MW?

Coat the countryside with wind turbines--it's what they've done near the SF area, although you'll note that as far as I can tell no turbines are visible from any point within what is generally considered "the Bay Area"... San Franciscans just NIMBY their power into the back yards of the "less enlightened".

As I understand it, current wind technology requires a lot more land (like, an order of magnitude) and intensive maintenance if you want to get even in the same ballpark of energy output, and that's assuming a location that's good for wind power. You can hardly just drop wind turbines into an existing plant to multiply the energy output like they're planning to do here with nuclear reactors.

Aren't the largest wind farms lucky to get 30% of 1000 MW, and that only where and when it's windy?

To clarify, I am not a big fan of wind power :)

Germany's installed wind power production is 27000 MW. Their solar capacity is 24800 MW.

Increasing the rates paid for electricity actually helps renewables, by making them more competitive. Just like any increase to the gas tax helps electric vehicles compete, any increase to the average price-per-kWh makes alternative energy sources that much closer to economic viability.

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