The mechanism of producing power used to be by burning something,but in nuclear energy was a new source of energy and a new way of generating heat. One bound of uranium which equivalent to the size of a finger, if they can release all the energy it has it will be equivalent to the energy of 5000 barrels of oil.
The problem with nuclear power is that was used in the first place to make an atomic bomb, and that’s what gives it a negative image. There is a huge gap between fossil fuel and renewable energy. The problem with renewable energy like wind and solar power is that it is not always sunny or windy. So they must have natural gas as a backup. What we end up with renewable energy is the expansion of natural gas. In order to get the most from renewable energy like solar power, we need 3000 feet altitude, flat island and 360 of sun light. That what makes these kind of energy sources limited.
In this blog, I would like to contribute something instead of writing a review about Pandora’s Promise. I will be comparing the nuclear power and wind power from an economical side.
As a general rule, the bigger the nuclear power reactor is, the more efficient it is and the more efficient any generator is, the cheaper electricity it produces. Nuclear reactors scale up very well, but because of efficiency and over head issues they do not easy scales down. Newer nuclear design helped with this problem. On another hand, nuclear will never be economical for small scale generations which make it more suitable for large areas that have large populations. The international agency estimated that the nuclear power is leveled generation cot are between 3 cents and 4.8 cents per kilowatt an hour. As compared to 3cents to 5 cents for wind. However, the contraction cost for nuclear plants are about 90000 per kilowatt of capacity as compared to 15000 for coal and just 1000 for wind.In fact between 50 and 75 % of the generation cost of nuclear plants are paying back the initial investment. The cost for nuclear plant is very front-loaded, most of the costs occur in the contraction that most occur before any single watt is being produced. This makes nuclear plants a riskier economic investment than coal or natural gas, but once the plant is finished and producing electricity, nuclear has much less risk than it is for fossil fuel and wind counter apart,because it is much less sensitive to rise in cost fuel and the threat of carbon.
Operation and maintenance are high for nuclear plants than wind at an annual 63 dollar per kilowatt of capacity as compared to 27 dollar per kilowatt for wind. If wind power is much cheaper than nuclear, in construction, cost, operation cost and fuel cost, why we don’t go with the wind instead of nuclear? Wind by it is nature is an intermit generator, the turbines will only generate power when the wind is blowing, and the blades are spinning. In USA, which has some of the best wind potential, wind turbines capacity factor only averaged in 33%. That means if you have a generator that was rated at 300 watt and ran it for an hour in an ideal world you would produce 300 watt in hour of energy. This mean that the actual energy generated is 100% of the maximum capacity of generation. On average, a wind turbine rated at 300 watts only generate 100 watt hour of energy per hour. This is much lower than the capacity of nuclear capacity factor, which average over 90% in USA. This means in order to get the same amount of energy in the same amount of time, you need to install two to three times as wind capacity as would nuclear. That’s cancels out the cost advantage that wind has over nuclear. The nature of wind leads to another problem we can not control. When the wind is blowing, and we can not control when electricity demand will rise and fall. This leads to the issue when the electricity generated by wind and can not immediately used. So the extra electricity is just wasted. When there is more demand at a given can be met by current wind speed there is no way to pick up this lack of electricity. The solution to this problem would be to store the generated energy and keep it stored until the time of higher demand. There is no actual way to store large amount of energy yet. Also, large scale energy storage is too expensive and unconvinced to be an option for now.
sources :
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Economic-Aspects/Economics-of-Nuclear-Power/
http://theenergycollective.com/willem-post/310631/more-realistic-cost-wind-energy