Why is everyone shouting that the nuclear deal is so expensive?
I have to admit that I'm not really getting all this screaming about how expensive the nuclear deal is. Just not getting it at all:
Seven years ago, I collected all the available cost estimates for nuclear power. The US Nuclear Energy Institute suggested a penny a kilowatt hour. The Royal Academy of Engineering confidently predicted 2.3p. The British government announced that in 2020 the price would be between 3 and 4p. The New Economics Foundation guessed that it could be anywhere between 3.4 and 8.3p; 8.3 pence was so far beyond what anyone else forecast that I treated it as scarcely credible. It falls a penny short of the price now agreed by the British government.
And there's any number of people out there shouting that at £92 per MWhr Ed Davey has agreed to pay twice the current price for the electricity that will be generated. Or, as George Monbiot points out above, that 9.2 p or so per kWhr.
Sure, this is indeed more expensive than the current costs of electricity but here's the bit that I'm not getting. These complaints, they're over something that is vastly cheaper than all of the other things that are being done with the full agreement of those currently complaining.
This strike price, it's the same as a feed in tariff in its effects. And here's the list of the feed in tarifs on other technologies. Solar at 14.9 p, Hydro at 21.65 p, wind at 21.65 p again. This nuclear scheme, the one that people are complaining so hard about, is under half the cost of wind power. So, either nuclear is amazingly cheap or it's grossly expensive and wind power is twice as bad either way around.
So, as I say, I don't really get it. How can people complain about the costs of this nuclear deal and then go on to support alternative technoligies which are twice as expensive?