Comment Re:Long story short... (Score 1) 158
I know people don't like [...] the annual Lazard reports on LCOE [...] (for some reason I don't quite understand yet)
As I recall, Lazard tells you the cost of a power plant but (i) excludes the cost of transmission lines (more of which have to be built for spread-out renewables than more concentrated forms of energy), and (ii) it does not tell you the value of energy. Because energy must be sold in the same moment it is generated, the value of solar and wind will decrease as time goes on because e.g. solar competes with whatever other energy happens to be generated in that same instant -- and we're planning to build more solar, so that self-competition increases over time, as does cross-competition between solar and wind. Firm power, on the other hand, can strategically choose when to generate in order to increase revenue per unit of energy. So nothing's wrong with Lazard, it's just not telling the whole story. (Even I'm not telling the whole story because it's a long story.)
Nuclear is a special case, where it can theoretically choose when to generate but in traditional plants the fuel is cheap and the plant is expensive, so the owners are tempted to generate at all times (baseload). And if I were a solar/wind owner, I might be temped to lobby against nuclear (as well as potential competing solar projects) for this reason. However, Molten Salt Reactors can avoid such "overgeneration" using molten salt energy storage: run your reactor all the time, but put the heat into giant salt tanks instead of directly generating electricity. Then build three times as much generating capacity as the reactor needs, so that when electricity prices are high, the plant can dump lots of energy onto the grid and make a profit. (This wouldn't work as well for traditional reactors, because their heat is only 300 Celcius vs 650 Celcius for MSRs; at such a temperature, dramatically more salt would be required, and it would probably be tricky to keep it from solidifying)
One problem is it includes a single very bad dam break in China in the hydroelectric numbers, a single event that skews everything considerably, not exactly relevant to safety in the USA. Nuclear power safety numbers include Chernobyl, but not Fukushima
It's kind of weird to point out that bad communist engineering isn't relevant to the USA, without considering that bad communist engineering also caused Chernobyl. Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors did not have containment buildings, and they used a combination of materials (graphite moderator + light water + natural uranium) that was very cheap but also unstable (the technical term being "positive void coefficient of reactivity"). So by all means exclude the Banqiao dam disaster -- but then exclude Chernobyl for the same reason. RBMK-type designs have never been legal in the West.
Fukushima deaths caused by radiation are may be zero so far. For all I know, there could be hundreds of eventual deaths from increased cancer (though they try to compensate with increased cancer screenings), but I don't know of any researchers suggesting that Fukushima was anywhere near as bad as Chernobyl. Reportedly, over a thousand deaths were caused by "stress" of the population relocation, mostly among elderly people -- certainly more elderly deaths than the radiation would have caused if most people hadn't relocated, or were allowed to return home in a timely manner. But don't take my word for it, look at studies or cross-reference figures for radiation avoided (Table 5) against the risks of radiation according to NASA, or watch this video.