This paper presents average national levelized costs for generating technologies that are brought on line in 20161 as represented in the National Energy Modeling System (NEMS) as configured for the Annual Energy Outlook 2011 (AEO2011) reference case.2

Levelized cost is often cited as a convenient summary measure of the overall competiveness of different generating technologies. Levelized cost represents the present value of the total cost of building and operating a generating plant over an assumed financial life and duty cycle, converted to equal annual payments and expressed in terms of real dollars to remove the impact of inflation. Levelized cost reflects overnight capital cost, fuel cost, fixed and variable O&M cost, financing costs, and an assumed utilization rate for each plant type.3 For technologies such as solar and wind generation that have no fuel costs and relatively small O&M costs, levelized cost changes in rough proportion to the estimated overnight capital cost of generation capacity. For technologies with significant fuel cost, both fuel cost and overnight cost estimates significantly affect levelized cost. The availability of various incentives including state or federal tax credits can also impact the calculation of levelized cost. The values shown in the tables below do not incorporate any such incentives. As with any projections, there is uncertainty about all of these factors and their values can vary regionally and across time as technologies evolve.

http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/aeo/electricity_generation.html

Thought the above paper may be of interest to some of you. Makes Solar and wind look very expensive!!

Because one has to try to normalise numbers to compare them, even if the normalisation is known to be imperfect.

Rgds

Damon

I think it is a useful comparison, even if the methodology is not perfect, as it shows the difficulty of replacing one technology with another.
One advantage of renewables is that they can be scaled down reasonably well. Or to put it another way, it is hard to build a 4kWp nuclear power station on a foot print of a few square meters while sharing that area with a family of 4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk0WzCtF0yY).
At least they have tried to quantify the trade off between availability and cost.

Yes, here is a quote, "Each of the nuclear power plant modules will produce 40,000 kilowatts (40 MegaWatts) of electricity"
So a factor of 10,000 difference

I am all for nuclear, but not so sure about the local electrician having a go at fixing it, or that 'nephew' who knows 'everything about them' and can get it to produce 20% more power. Mate of mine found out how to make his diesel car go faster, he filled it with half a tank of gasoline and drove off, worked a tread for about 20 miles.

Is there a high correlation of thyroid cancer in submariners?

Yes correlation is only really useful as a starting point for investigation and for testing models/data/predictions at the end.

I have heard the story about not building NRs down here because of the background radiation, still not sure if it is a romantic story or true, if anyone knows of the EIA that definitively answers that I would like the link. I keep telling people that they are going to build one at Hayle and St. Ives will be a wasteland, but that is only as I would like to live there and have less traffic.

So we have more thyroid cancers here than people that live by a reactor, or the other way around?

If you only pass through Cornwall on the way to somewhere else, can you tell me if the Scilly's are worth a visit, or you talking about St. Just being 'somewhere else' as in a Tolkien place with two headed babies, wiccans, grey old men and talking trees.
Oh and rather badly cooked haddock in the chip shop.

And your family coming from there too

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: SteamyTea</cite>Yes correlation is only really useful as a starting point for investigation and for testing models/data/predictions at the end.

I have heard the story about not building NRs down here because of the background radiation, still not sure if it is a romantic story or true, if anyone knows of the EIA that definitively answers that I would like the link. I keep telling people that they are going to build one at Hayle and St. Ives will be a wasteland, but that is only as I would like to live there and have less traffic.

So we have more thyroid cancers here than people that live by a reactor, or the other way around?

If you only pass through Cornwall on the way to somewhere else, can you tell me if the Scilly's are worth a visit, or you talking about St. Just being 'somewhere else' as in a Tolkien place with two headed babies, wiccans, grey old men and talking trees.
Oh and rather badly cooked haddock in the chip shop.</blockquote>

I can confirm that the background radiation level in parts of West Cornwall is fairly high. I started life as a chemist, working at what was then the Radiochemical Centre, a part of Harwell and the old UK Atomic Energy Authority. One weekend I "borrowed" a Geiger–Müller counter from work and took it home. Walking around Porkellis moor there were granite outcrops that were off the scale on the counter and so would have been unsafe in terms of a place to work, even back in those pre-H&SAW Act times, by a considerable margin. Similarly, I got hold of a spare film badge (the things we all had to wear at work to record our exposure to radiation) and left it on my mothers mantelpiece for a week. When I retrieved it and took it back to work the Health Physics people reckoned the badge had clocked up around 9 weeks worth of safe exposure in one week..........

83, still running the farm and playing tennis once or twice a week in summer, badminton in winter.................

83? Right, where's my nearest reactor?

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: DamonHD</cite>My late uncle, when he was chief counsel for the CEGB, had figures (IIRC) that showed that deaths from *all* causes were lower for workers at nuke plants than the general population.

Rgds

Damon</blockquote>

I strongly suspect that one reason for this is the health monitoring that nuclear establishments have. Back when I worked for UKAEA in the early 70's we had weekly urine testing, monthly thyroid scans and general medicals (including blood tests) every 6 months. The chances are that with this level of health screening serious diseases might well be picked up earlier than within the general population, with the chance of a better outcome to treatment.

Data Stratification, I just love it.

DECC could do a chart about it. Ben Goldacre writes about it

Was there not a report out today about health and lifestyles.
All I can remember was that smoking is bad, as is excessive drinking. But women being overweight is OK, men must eat more fruit.

I have no idea who sponsored it but let us just say a supermarket did. I know that fags are sold as lost leaders, and some drink it.
So but pointing out to women that being a bit large is not harmful they may spend more on food, which has a good mark up and less on cheap booze and fags.

Run that through the ' The Paradox of the Ravens' and see Karl Popper twist an turn