[LINK] "Gas Makes Nuclear Power Radioactive"

[rfmcdonald]

Liam Denning's Bloomberg View note that, with cheap gas prices, nuclear plant construction is overwhelmingly government-driven and concentrated in just a few countries, is noteworthy.

Nuclear plants are dogged by long planning, approval and construction times, due to the fact that they are, well, nuclear. When the newest U.S. reactor, coming online soon at a plant in Tennessee, was first granted a license to operate, Gerald Ford was sitting in the Oval Office. Such huge, complex capital projects risk cost overruns. And long lead times can leave backers exposed as they pour billions of dollars into a plant years before it generates a watt of electricity.

Thus the importance of that slumping gas price: It suppresses wholesale electricity prices in many parts of the country. It also comes as a surprise -- natural gas prices were in double digits a decade ago and are now flirting with $2 per million British thermal units. True, gas emits carbon, whereas nuclear plants do not. But gas plants can also be built much more quickly, are more flexible, cleaner than coal, and don’t emit the sort of waste that Homer Simpson really shouldn’t be handling.

It is no accident that the new nuclear plant due to be built in the U.K., in which China just took a stake, is getting built with the aid of government guarantees on loans and long-term power prices. That plant was first proposed in 2006 and will likely not enter service until 2025.

[. . .]

More than four fifths of capacity being built is in China, Russia, India and South Korea, countries with a heavy degree of government intervention and, in Korea’s case, almost wholly dependent on imports of primary energy.