The papers have been filled with reviews of the year and we're barrelling into awards season, so it's only fitting that we have some awards of our own. My colleagues over on the very entertaining Nuclear Reactions have been staging their own award ceremony, "to recognise those who have help make the nuclear industry the over-subsidised and under-scrutinised joke it is today".
With tongues placed firmly in cheeks, nukeheads in Europe and elsewhere have been vying for the gongs in several categories:
Meanwhile, Carbon Commentary's Chris Goodall has been working out what the plunging value of sterling means for the prospects of new nuclear power stations:
If the Finnish construction [at the beleaugered Olkiluoto site] costs were replicated in the UK, and the euro/pound exchange rate had remained at around £1/€1.50, the cost of the project would imply a cost to generate electricity of over £50 per megawatt hour. This is more than the current wholesale price in the UK (although the wholesale price has been much higher than this figure for most of the last 12 months).
In the last days of 2008, the pound/euro exchange rate has hovered around 1.03. At the time of the 2007 consultation paper, the government used a figure of almost €1.50/£1. This change has added over 40% to the cost of constructing a new power station. Expressed in terms of UK pounds, the €5.2bn prospective cost of the Finnish power station now implies a price in UK£ of about £5bn rather than about £3.5bn. This raises the prospective cost of electricity generated by the nuclear power station to around £70 per megawatt hour, or over £20 more than the current wholesale price. To be clear, at today’s electricity prices and exchange rates the operator of a nuclear power station built for the same price as the Finnish plant would lose £20 per megawatt hour. No rational electricity company intent on making a profit would contemplate making an investment in a nuclear station if these conditions persist.
The UK government Climate Change Committee issued a long report in December 2008 on how Britain might reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% between 1990 and 2050. Nuclear forms an important part of these plans. Unsurprisingly, the Committee used a nuclear cost estimate of less than £50 per megawatt hour. The bad news from Finland is only slowly leaking out and, of course, the pound/euro rate changes sharply from day to day.
