Estimated production cost of a kilowatt-hour in 2025: 6.6 cents
Waste: A typical nuclear power plant generates 22 tons of highly radioactive used nuclear fuel per year. The industry as a whole generates about 2,200 tons of used fuel annually. During the last four decades, the nation’s nuclear plants have produced about 64,000 tons of used nuclear fuel. That amount of waste would cover a football field about seven yards deep. Currently, the used fuel assemblies are stored in steel and concrete containers at each plant site. These wastes could be dramatically reduced if they were used to fuel fast-breeder reactors and/or thorium reactors.
Advantage: Nuclear power plants emit no greenhouse gases. Recoverable uranium reserves might last 1,000 years. If the world adopts fast-breeder nuclear technologies, the reserves are essentially limitless.
Disadvantage: Lots of political opposition, plus concerns that fuel can be diverted to make nuclear bombs.
Representative example: No nuclear power plants have been built in the United States since 1996.
Wind turbines
Wind turbines are driven by the wind to generate electricity. The 1.8-megawatt Vestas V90 turbine, for example, has three 148-foot blades on a 262-foot tower, totaling 410 feet in height. The blades sweep a vertical airspace of more than an acre and a half.
Technology invented: In 1888 Charles Brush built the first large windmill to generate electricity in Cleveland, Ohio. Some 17,000 utility-scale wind generators were built in California between 1981 and 1988.
Federal research dollars since 1976: $1.7 billion
Carbon emitted: none
Cost per facility: $5.6 billion
Production cost of a kilowatt-hour: 9.3 cents
Estimated production cost per kilowatt-hour in 2025: 7.3 cents
Waste: none once in operation
Advantage: Wind turbines do not emit greenhouse gases and need no fuel.
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Shannon Love|11.14.09 @ 1:16PM|#
This is a good article but it overlooks the most important cost factor. It doesn't matter how much it cost to generate a watt of electricity at the generation source, it only matters what it cost to receive a kilowatt of electricity at the point of consumption.
A good example of this would the real world cost of electricity from a portable diesel generator. You could calculate how much the generator cost and the average cost of diesel but that wouldn't tell you how much a kilowatt would cost if the generator was located in the wilds of Alaska and all the diesel had to be flown in. Likewise, the cost of hydroelectric power has to include the cost of transmission from were geology dictates the dam has to be to the point of consumption.
Since weather-dependent generation cannot produce power anything close to 24/7/365, the cost per kilowatt at the point of consumption has to include all cost of increased transmission, any energy storage systems and (far more realistically) the fossil fuel and nuclear plants that will always have to be running in the background to take up the slack with less than a half hour notice.
Electricity is not a luxury and it is not something we can do without. A modern economy is basically just a system for using electricity to turn dirt into useful things. We have to have electricity when and where we need all the time. Weather-dependent generation cannot provide that and has such it remain a toy for the foreseeable future.
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