Science

...we also need to think - although people seldom do so - about what "cost" means. To often it's looked at the immediate cost of the infrastructure to get a think running, and then the bill that's paid by the user.

From my perspective, this is immoral.

We need to think about the external cost, the cost to the environment, and just as importantly, probably more importantly, the cost to the future.

I lived in California for part of the time that the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant was being built, and for years I lived on the power provided by it and San Onofre, the beautiful plant on the drive between LA and San Diego, as well as that generated at Diablo Canyon.

The Diablo Canyon Plant came on line in 1985, two decades before this solar facility now rotting in the weeds at Napa Valley College was constructed. In paying for the plant, the citizens of California were making a gift to the future. If not destroyed by appeals to ignorance, the plant should last for the rest of my life, as I'm an old man, and then some. Diablo Canyon's physical footprint is about 12 acres and year after year after year after year it produces more electrical energy than all the wind turbines in California. (There are rotting wind farms in California.)

The used nuclear fuel at San Onofre and at Diablo Canyon is a critical resource for the future, no matter how many people want to declare it as "waste."

Table 30 in this report, from NREL (page 65) gives the material costs per kW for a wind turbine, based on size. Note that kW in this case consists of the lie that peak power is independent from capacity utilization. Wind turbines seldom, if ever, produce peak capacity for an extended period of time.

This, I think is obscene, particularly because the overwhelming majority of wind turbines now operating on this planet will be useless junk before 2050, 25 years from now, and that, I'm afraid, is being overly generous. The average lifetime of a wind turbine in Denmark is less than 20 years.

Focusing on "cost," however it's calculated, is myopic. The issue is sustainability, which includes material, land, and lifetime. No energy system can match nuclear power on these scores. None.

The moral issue is the right of the future to exist. I am certainly willing to pay for nuclear plants I will not live to use. We all owe it to give gifts to future generations. For sure, we have been ungenerous thus far, working more like thieves than providers.