Nuclear power in the news this week

After President Obama announced a multi-billion loan program to fund the construction of several nuclear power plants, various websites turned to the "old" technology and featured articles about the benefits and disadvantages.

One article by the New York Times describes the numbers behind nuclear power. Ok, it is not new that this power source requires large amount of capital expensises before the very first electron will leave the plant, the numbers were still astonishing.

The author Katie Fehrenbacher mentions $10 Billion as the price for a larger nuclear power plant (I assume a power range of 5-10 GW, giga watts). This number is gigantic for the costs, because beyond the construction, the power plant needs to be operated, maintained, updated, and at some point, the waste needs to be disposed (but where). And finally, someone has to guard the waste, so that no one builds dirty bombs out of it.

What would you say if you could have 10 GW of clean and renewable power?
Let me guess? Nuclear is clean, supposely it does not produce CO2, and the wind is not always blowing? Right?
I believe that nuclear could be an alternative to coal fired power plants (because I do not believe that the carbon capture technology will easily work in the near future), but nuclear is not emission free! Over the entire life cycle (all steps from the mining of the uran, the production of the enormous amount of concrete, and the transportation of the radio active material), nuclear power is not really emission free.

Could we then replace a nuclear power plant with renewable sources?
Probably not in a small scale. But several thousand mega-watts of wind power (an average wind turbine produces currently between 1-3 MW) distributed over a large geographical area could offset some of the power desire.

But most important are three other aspects:

• Several wind power plants installed over a large area would create more jobs than a single, fully automated nuclear power plant (unless you hire many people for the security personal)
• If you distribute the wind power plants over a large area, then the possibility of no power production because of no wind is very, very limited - almost impossible, and not more likely than a fault in a main transformer of the nuclear power plant
• Your installed wind power plants could be erected and commissioned very fast - probably before 2012. The permitting for a single nuclear power plant takes several years. It is currently expected that the announced power plants will be ready not before 2016 (not to mention that no nuclear plant was commissioned below budget and before commissing date). But also if the financing halts for the wind power plant, the already erected fraction of the plant can be connected to the grid and generated revenue. The nuclear power plant has to be fully completed and only then it returns revenue.