February 10, 2005
Nuclear Power Coming Back Online?
By Ian
Not for a while, if it does. But the recent report from a DOE Advisory Board is encouraging it. The recommendations include supports for starting new plants; despite falling price-per-kilowatt hour for nuclear energy, the startup costs remain the biggest stumbling block.
Here's the executive summary.
The bad news is that the report suggest cost-sharing and/or loan guarantees for companies looking to build the newest plant designs. From my reading of this brief summary, it appears that the costs of conforming to construction and safety regulation is between $400-$500 million dollars. And that's just the plans. Of course nuclear power requires stringent security measures, especially given their attractiveness as terrorism targets, but perhaps the committee could have suggested some sort of review of the regulatory process to see if that might not be a driving factor in the prohibatory cost of startup?
Posted at February 10, 2005 09:33 AM
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