Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb. Read more here.
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Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
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This appears to be a pretty amazing breakthrough – described as ‘leapfrog technology’.
It seems the International Energy Agency were not planning on industry by-passing government – they predicted a drop in demand for nuclear energy see: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE4AB2QB20081112
This is not what I heard from Elizabeth Sellers, one of the managers of Idaho National Laboratories last Thursday at Utah State University. She said that the current cost of Nuclear power at 1.5 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) is not realistically going to be what we will have to pay in the future because all the current plants have been written off completely due to the fact we have not licensed or built any new nuclear plants for almost three decades. She has information that power from new nuclear power plants that are fully capitalized would cost over 10 times as much or 15-18 cents per kw hour and as far as I could tell from her presentation this was the cost to the utility or wholesale cost and was then marked up 4-5 fold to pay for getting it to the customer, my own estimation would be 60-80 cents per kwh (I currently pay about 8 cents). This is not competitive with coal at 2.25 cent per kWh and coal was fully capitalized funding new plants. When I asked her about it she said she did not know how to solve the “conundrum” financially, but she said only one coal plant in Illinois was licensed in the whole country during the last year because no one wants them in their backyard. From her comments, going off coal looks like a financial impossibility to me. Candles anyone??