The new pebble bed nuclear power plant designs are quite exciting and should be pursued avidly. Their relative safety is much higher than our current plants whose track record is admirable.

Remember, the rad. environmentalists do not want nuclear, or effective wind power, or effective solar power as it would solve our problems and we could keep on keeping on with our lives. Their goal is to disrupt our lives and impose their own Little House on the Prairie vision on everybody. In reality their ideas would lead to a Little Outhouse in the Alley with a long line of miserable people.

Meanwhile the 35 odd nuclear plants in the US pipeline to be built, with nary a one in California, will come on line in the next decade.

He/she doesn’t need to express any preferences, just let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Include the back-up power costs associated with any intermittent power source so everything is compared on an equal footing. Since nuclear power has demonstrated the highest, most consistent capacity factor over the past 30 years of nearly 90%, then that should become the benchmark for comparison.

Leave out carbon credits, feed-in tariffs, subsidies and other schemes to game the real costs of building. And factor in the average length of life span for the plant. I think Barry Brook at http://www.bravenewclimate.com has done much of this in his TCASE series.

The national capacity factor for wind is 28%, far better than in Europe. Any capacity credit for wind, a la ERCOT, is merely statistical in nature, for no one can predict at any time ahead interval how much wind energy would be available. Wind energy does not work when most desired.

All conventional generators have effective capacities of 99.999%; otherwise, they’d be removed from the grid. Wind has zero effective capacity.

Why continue to compare costs between these ineffectual renewables and sources of power that are highly effective? Is it even rationale to think that people believe that the cost of a proven lemon is in any way comparable in value to the most highly performing, most responsive vehicles?

A second hidden cost of fickle renewables is the additional rapid-ramping generation (natural gas) or substantial storage (pumped hydro being the only one suitable at present) needed to back up the renewables when they drop off. Considerable experience in Spain, Germany and Denmark has demonstrated this reality. Texas ERCOT currently rates wind farms at 8.9% of capacity for next day generation forecasting. Nuclear plants are typically 90%.

But the Chernobyl reactor was different from the reactors everywhere else in the world. It was a Soviet monstrosity with literally no safety features. In contrast, consider the Three Mile Island accident, a major accident that destroyed the reactor but didn’t cause harm to anyone. Judging nuclear energy by Chernobyl is the same as judging aviation by the Hindenburg disaster.

Robert Bryce continues to perform yeoman service in the cause of enlightened energy policy. However, even he should stop using apples to orangoutangs comparisons between the cost of nuclear and other conventional generators and the “cost” of intermittent volatile generators like wind and solar. Since the latter provides zero capacity value (no one can know how much energy they will produce at any future time) and no modern power performance– and they are neither dispatchable nor controllable–there can be nothing but a Faustian exchange between their value and the value of conventional power sources.

Trading nuclear, or coal, or natural gas, or hydro generation for wind, for example, is akin to trading Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Sandy Koufax, or Willy Mays for a third string high school baseball player who made the team because of his father’s contributions to the alumni fund.