Page 10 RAIN December 1977 Pouring Money Down the Both Amory" Lovins and Charles Komanoff have done yeoman work in calmly showing nuclear-electric power to be uneconomic, unnecessary and undesirable, rather like the little boy at the parade who spoke the truth about the Emperor having no clothes, but they do it with ample references to the literature in support of cogent arguments. Amory's most recent useful item is "Epitaph for an Industry," a lovely piece on how the nuclear dinosaur is dying, and why we should hasten its demise, in the Nov. '77 issue of Not Man Apart. A complete version of his testimony on the same date to the same·congressional subc_ommittee as Komanoff is available from "Nuclear Blowdown," clo NMA, 124 Spear St.,.San Francisco, CA 94105. Chuck. is best known so far, and thanked by anti-nuclear intervenors, for his two very useful analyses of nuclear/coal economics and reliability, Power Plant Performance (1976) and Nuclear Plant Performance Update (1977). These technically-tight yet understandable handbooks are available from the Council on Economic Priorities, 84 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 1-0011. What you'll read below is his most recent analysis, done September 21, 1977, for the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Environment, Energy and Natural Resources, , which asked him 'to testify as an expert on nuclear power costs. Charles, and Edward Kahn of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, are now working on wind-electric capacity factors and economics for the next revisions of Performance and Update, an idea which I suggested in the spring of 1977 would be extremely valuable to intervenors and their technical consultants in t~e many windy ,areas of the nation where power companies are still trying to .sell us the "peaceful" atom. If we can't stop the utilities from building power plants, then at the very least those new plants should be wind and solar rather than nuclear or coal. Please write to Chuck at Komanoff Enc:,rgy Associates, 545 Madison Ave., 9th Floor, New York, NY 10022, ifyou've got wind energy costs, reliability and capacity factor data to share. It'll help all of us out a lot. Thanks very much. - LJ NOTES TO TEXT 1. The calculation and supporting assumptions are in C. Komanoff, Rebuttal Testimony in Behalf of the County of Suffolk, In the Matter of Long Island Lighting Company, Jamesport Nuclear Power Station, Units 1 and 2, Case 80003, before the New York State Board on Electric Generation Siting and the Environmen~. August 30, 1977. Assumptions are: nuclear equivalent forced outage rate (EFOR) of 22.3 THECOSTSOFNUCLEARPOWER The economics of nuclear power,are bad and getting worse. In my judgment, no utility executive with an accurate perception of the costs of nuclear power and a sincere desire to minimize customer costs would propose ordering a new nuclear plant, with the possible exception of utilities in New England. Nuclear plants cost too much t'o build, relative to coal plants; and more unreliable and erratic in performance than coal plants; and are available only in large unit sizes unsuited to even the largest U.S. power gri9s. These problems more than cancel nuclear plants' fuel c;ost, advantage over coal-fired facilities. On an overall life-cycle cost basis, I believe that electricity from new nuclear plants will cost 22 percent more than electricity from new coal plants, averaged over the seven regions of the country. By region, nuclear's cost disadvantage ranges from 1 percent in the Northeast to 49 percent in the Mountain states and Pacific Northwest, as seen in Table 1: percent, on-peak scheduled outage rate (SOR) of 6 percent; coal EFOR of 14.9 percent and on-peak SOR of 3 percent. Of the 22 percent difference in capacity required (1800 Mw vs. 2300 Mw), 13 percent results from different outage rates and 9 percent from different unit sizes. The methodology was developed by E. P. Kahn, Lawrence Berkeley-Laboratory, Testimony before the New jersey Board of Public Utility Commissioners, Construction Hearings Dqcket No. 762-194, 1977. 2. I.C. Bupp et al, Trends in Light Water Capital Costs in the United States: Causes arid Consequences. Center for Policy Alternatives, MIT, CPA 74-~, December 18, 1974, and several. follow-up reports.by Bupp.
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