Word: coal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nukes cost $200 per kilowatt (kW) to build, coal plants around $175. But nuclear construction prices quickly began climbing. By the late 1970s, Komanoff says, nukes cost $700 per kW, compared with $500 for coal plants. Now, with post-T.M.I. requirements pushing the price of nuclear construction even higher, coal plants are clearly more economical. According to Komanoff, a coal-fired plant with state-of-the-art pollution-control equipment can be built today for around $1,200 per kW; a nuclear plant costs $3,000 per kW. Says Komanoff: "The power industry may really have made only...
...danger of radiation release makes the precision required in putting up a nuclear plant much greater than the accuracy needed in an ordinary coal-fired facility. "It's like building a giant Swiss watch," says David Freeman, a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates two atomic plants. Many nuclear construction crews tried to build these Swiss watches with little more than the skills needed to hammer together a coal burner. Delays and repairs have led to catastrophic cost overruns, which have plagued many plants completed in recent years as well as some of those currently under construction. Florida...
Compared with coal burners, nuclear power plants generate little waste. A 1,000-MW coal-fired facility produces 30 lbs. of ash per sec., which comes to 423,040 tons a year, or enough to fill 2,568 trailer trucks. The waste from a nuclear plant of the same size would fit into a refrigerator...
...contents of that refrigerator would be much more difficult to dispose of than all those ash-laden trucks. Coal ash is essentially inert and harmless. Used nuclear fuel rods, which are 12 ft. long and ½ in. in diameter and are fastened together in bundles reminiscent of the fasces carried by magisterial aides of ancient Rome, remain very dangerous. Contaminated by such fission products as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 239, they are not only physically hot (at several hundred degrees), but will remain radioactive for thousands of years...
...French government hopes that by 1990, 70% of electric power will come from reactors. In Japan, where the atom generates 19% of the electricity, the target for 1990 is 27%. Many nations that lack abundant coal, oil or hydroelectric power regard nuclear energy as a necessity. Despite its rising costs, atomic power is often a cheaper alternative to imported fuel. In Japan a kilowatt of nuclear energy costs 5.2?, compared with 5.8? for the same amount of electricity generated by coal and 7.3? for power from oil. Nuclear plants have an impressive worldwide safety record. Government inspections abroad are generally...