From the May 2013 issue of Power Engineering Magazine:
(The real problem with) Nuclear power is (that it is) prohibitively expensive. As Michael Levi, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations says, “nuclear power isn't being kept down by safety rules, public opposition or waste problems. It's stalled because it's expensive.” Though there is new build happening around the world, most of it tends to be a result of top-down policy designed to meet discrete objectives, like addressing the coal pollution problem in China or reserving fossil fuels for export in the UAE. In most of the world under free market conditions nuclear power does not fare well amid high and unpredictable capital costs and the low price of power tied to cheap natural gas. With time, the cost of building passively safe Generation III+ plants may very well come down, but in order for the high expense of nuclear power to drop to any meaningful degree:
Fossil fuels must be forced to absorb the cost of their own externalities. This final point may be the key to unlocking a bright nuclear future. Nuclear power in the US has to pay for its own externalities in the form of the nuclear waste fee levied by the Department of Energy (fees that have not, it must be said, bought the industry a nuclear waste repository). Fossil fuel-fired power plants, however, have thus far been exempted from paying for their main externalities, the greenhouse gases that are placing the planet in increasingly grave danger. A tax (or some other method of imposing a cost on emissions) on carbon would go a long way toward leveling the playing field and giving nuclear a chance to compete, which it might fare well at because:
Monty Bannerman
ArcStar Energy
646.402.5076
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