Some cold water on nuclear
This Bloomberg article (via Andrew Eder) goes into quite a bit of detail about TVA's current and past nuclear program. This part caught my eye (although I don't know how these estimates were derived):
Investment banking consultant Gary L. Hunt, president of Global Energy Advisors in Sacramento, California, estimates the cost of building a [nuclear] plant at $2,214 per kilowatt of generating capacity. The market places a value of $1,730 per kilowatt of generating capacity on currently operating reactors, he says.
TVA's renovation of Browns Ferry Unit One was attractive because it retooled an old reactor for just $1,558 per kilowatt.
By comparison, traditional coal-fired plants cost $2,022 per kilowatt to build, Hunt says. And Congress is considering clean-air legislation that would add about $500 per kilowatt to the cost of those conventional coal plants.
So, the cost of building a new nuclear plant seems competitive as compared to a coal-fired plant. However, it should come as no surprise that the decay of our economy's manufacturing base has had a nasty effect. Here's some of the blowback from globalization:
The Nuclear Energy Institute estimates that only about 10 percent of the U.S. manufacturing capacity that existed to build the current generation of nuclear reactors remains.
Most companies that produced the heavy steel forgings, cables, pumps and valves that went into U.S. reactors in the 1960s and 1970s have since been acquired by non-U.S. companies or folded, making parts hard to find and expensive.
Does that mean if we want to build a new nuclear plant, we'll have to import the expertise to do so? God help us, we've done gone and offshored the technological know-how that fueled our post-War rise as an economic powerhouse. I doubt seriously that trend can be reversed.
The article goes on to say that we'll need to build the equivalent of a new Brown's Ferry Unit One every 20 months just to keep up with the expected rise in demand within TVA's service region. That's a lot of imported labor, and I don't see how it's possible.