$850 million for 130 MW? That's $6.50 a watt. Commercial scale solar is supposed to be around $1.60. Am I missing something here?

> Hard to do the financing when you have 10-15 years of lawsuits to settle before you can pour the first yard of concrete...

There is no such thing. Regulatory overhead was calculated to be 3.7% in recent builds.

Meanwhile, actual paid-for costs for new plants are around $8/W, about 7 to 8 times the CAPEX for wind.

You can pretend this isn't the problem and invent boogiemen all you want. But it *is* the problem.

> the high cost of wind and solar implies

Wind and solar are far, far cheaper than nuclear. Between four and eight times cheaper. Here, read some up-to-date numbers...

http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf

> Good point, but options for more hydro are very limited

They are far less limited than nuclear. Nuclear power has cost, infrastructure, quality and proliferation issues. Hydro costs a fraction as much, is easy to build (we were doing it over a century ago), presents no proliferation issues, and tends to threaten people only around the site. Would you be OK building a hydro dam in North Korea? What about a nuclear plant?

Before you claim it's all gone, hydro is less than 50% developed worldwide. That is a fractal measure, it is about 50% underdeveloped at every level of scale. It is about 50% underdeveloped in the US, as well as 50% underdeveloped in the east, west, north and south. There is enough in Canada to power much more than the whole country, but only a little over half currently is. Etc. The same is true for China and Brazil, let alone Egypt and Bhutan.

> On the upside, nuclear fusion research is promising here at the UW

No, it's not.

Fusion plants are fission plants with a different nuclear island. Their version of the nuclear island is far, far more expensive than the fission version. It will never not be so. At a minimum the energy is so diffuse, the construction costs alone are much more. But then when you add in huge amounts of lithium and superconducting, it's gets pear shaped very quickly.

Right now, a fission plant costs enough more than wind that no one is building them. In fact, the price of the non-nuclear portions of a fission plant is higher than wind. In other words, even if the reactor were completely free, they still wouldn't build them. And since a fusion reactor has the same non-island parts, no one is going to build one of those either. Unless you can build fusion plants for negative money, lots and lots of negative money.

You will protest that people are building reactors. Not really. You can only afford to do so if you get money for free, like in China. But even there, wind is being built at about 3 to 5 times the rate.

So if no one will build fission, they certainly aren't going to build fusion. Everyone in the power industry is perfectly aware of this, they've been publishing reports saying this for decades, but the people working on fusion refuse to believe it. They think the problem is technical, that if you build a working reactor everyone will magically start using them. They won't.

> the single energy technology that has already offset huge amounts of carbon generation

Hydro. Longer and more. By far.

> Nobody seems to want to give nuclear credit for what its already done.

Says the guy that forgets about hydro.

> But nobody wants to dismantle old nuclear plants that are still running fine.

Quebec did. New Brunswick wished it did. Ontario is about to.

> Today, wind can augment hydro, and to lesser degree, other power sources.

Food for thought...

Six months worth of Canada's total power use is currently backed up behind dams on the east side of James Bay.

One of the best wind resources in north america is the east side of James Bay.

> Wind is a good bit better but still needs natural gas peaking plants to back it

So does nuclear for the opposite reason. Most nukes don't throttle well, and those that do only do so for lowered economic performance.

Everyone says we should add the cost of the gas plant to the wind plant, but never say the same for the nuclear plant. That is in spite of the fact that a large amount of peaking capacity was added for the reactors. Like Nanticoke.

> your negligently operated nuclear power plant blows up and destroys my house that's criminal negligent

I'm sure you'll feel completely satisfied by their eventual 3-year suspended sentence when you're living in a tent.

> And BTW Olkiluoto absurd costs might indicate Areva's EPR design is too expensive

Every reactor under construction in "the west" is over budget.

I believe that statement is true at all times in the last 50 years.

> but we should way 2 more years when the first EPR installation in China enters operation

Sure, because we all trust Chinese bookkeeping on construction projects. Especially after Sichuan. Or Banqiao.

> and by doing so giving a big middle finder to those victims

Like you're giving a big middle finger to the 160,000 people forced out of their perfectly good homes by Fukushima.

I'm not sure I would be so quick to ignore their suffering just to make a point.

> Do you trust those that are more driven by their agenda than human compassion?

You should definitely be asking yourself that very question.

> but Solar for now can't be baseload anyhow

Baseload power is currently selling for 1.8 cents/kWh. Peak is selling for about 25 cents.

> I think orbital will be a viable choice vs nuclear or gas.

Numbers please.

> PG&E did some serious research into it

Their "serious research" consists entirely of a blog post and giving some money to a "company" consisting of two guys and a dog who promptly disappeared.

> The main reason the plan failed is still NIMBY

The main reason the plan failed is...

1) it never actually existed beyond a press release that succeeded in getting the techno-nerds to blogroll their advertising for free
2) Any reasonable input numbers return LCoE on the order of $35 per kWh. That compares to about 0.10 to $0.20 for ground-based PV

A science fiction author? Faint praise indeed.

It's not like the math is complex. If you feel it's being misrepresented, fine, post your numbers. Here's mine:

https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-maury-equation-redux/