This is not exactly “news.” Nuclear power plant  construction is synonymous with cost overruns.

(This is a “systems problem.” Anytime you have a 10 to 15 year project in the $Billion range you will find several reinforcing feedback mechanisms that increase the cost and few, if any, balancing feedback mechanisms that keep the costs at a steady state. A brief delay or a minor increase in inflation will cost $Millions.)

Costs of the proposed nuclear plants in San Antonio, TX, have skyrocketed, even tho construction has not yet begun. Originally forecast at $2 Billion per gigawatt (gw) of capacity, roughly the cost of wind power, it is now clear that they will cost between $4.5 Billion and $6.5 Billion per gw of capacity – $12.1 billion to $17.5 billion for the reactors.

This is in line with the costs of the Florida Power & Light‘s new reactors at Turkey Point and an estimate by Arjun Makhijani at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Assessing Nuclear Plant Capital Costs for the Two Proposed NRG Reactors at the South Texas Project Site.

CPS Energy, of San Antonio, one of the partners, alleged that Nuclear Innovation North America, NINA, jointly owned by NRG Systems and Toshiba, “lied to the city-owned utility in order to lure it into the project.” (Deliberate misrepresentation of the facts is also a “Systems Problem,” but of a Different system. ) Whether or not this is the case, it seems clear that new nuclear power plants can only be built with loan guarantees, called by some “nuclear socialism.” However, according to Mark Cooper, Stephen Thomas, and Arjun Makhijani, in Business Week, (click)

Latest Industry Setbacks Further Dim Nuclear ‘Renaissance,’ Taxpayer-Backed Loan Guarantees Can’t Fix Fundamental Problems With New Reactors

Rejection by Private Financing, Skyrocketing Cost Projections, Falling Demand, and Faulty Reactor Designs Can’t Be Solved With U.S. Shifting to “Nuclear Socialism” to Bail Out Industry.

The beleaguered nuclear power industry is … unable to move forward without a bailout in the form of taxpayer-backed loan guarantees involving a high risk of default.

This is double or triple the costs of wind power and in line with the capital costs for utility scale solar. However, the maintenance and operating costs are low for solar and wind, and there are no fuel costs, no mining and fuel transport costs, no waste management costs, no need for government insurance or government limits to insurance liability, no additional security costs – terrorists won’t be interested in bombing wind turbines or solar arrays. Solar arrays can easily be built in 10 kilowatt (kw) segments, wind power plants can be built in 1 to 3.5 megawatt (mw) modules – these are scalable; elements are brought on-line immediately.  Rather than the optimistic 5 years or a more realistic 12 to 15 years years to build a nuclear power plant – and therefore the interest costs are much less for solar and wind than with nuclear, which have to be financed long before they are operational.

NRG Thermal is doing some cutting edge work on a combined heat and power system for the new University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro, NJ (Business Wire). NRG has recently acquired Bluewater Wind from its parents, Babcock & Brown and Arcadia Windpower, (press release). At Popular Logistics, we expect they will find energy from the wind costs less to produce than energy from nuclear power.