Ben Rose,

How embarrassed you must feel having agreed to debate this subject then having to run away with your tail between your legs because you lost on every point. You provided nothing of substance relevant to the points being debated. You couldn't refute any of my points. Instead you tried, bluff, avoidance, diversion and piles of unsubstantiated assertions and personal beliefs. Where you criticised my figures you couldn't provide any alternative figures. In fact you never even tried to do so. How embarrassing, eh?

You said:

"But now you are coming up with tripe figures out of your head - like you reckon transmission would add $25 to renewables but not nuclear. And then pull another $45 (!) out of the air for some amorphous 'risk' you perceive of non delivery, which you say apples only to renewables!

Meanwhile you ignore the risk of accidents like Fukushima - which ACTUALLY HAPPENED - and cost more than a 100% renewable electricity system for the whole of Western Australia. And you call yourself an engineer with integrity?"

The Fukushima figure you quoted is irrelevant. You haven't provided the accident risk as an LCOE figure. So it is irrelevant. Why pick Fukushima rather than any of the other ~400 NPPS's that haven't had an accident in 60 years - do you now understand why your assertions are nonsense? (Insurance companies don't estimate insurance rates on just the house that's been robbed or burnt down).

I am still waiting for you to produce alternative LCOE figures and justify them. You say my numbers are wrong, I'm talking nonsense and pulling numbers out of the air. Yet you've provided none. I'm sitting here waiting for you to produce alternative LCOE figures and the basis for them, then I'll critique them. I'll also give you the basis of estimate for the figures I gave.

Nuclear cost reduction potential and learning rates:

The potential to reduce costs of nuclear (e.g. by deregulating to facilitate private sector competition, innovation and R&D) is huge.

Professor Bernard Cohen, 1991 ‘Costs of Nuclear Power Plants – What Went Wrong?’ says regulatory ratcheting increased costs of nuclear power by a factor of 4 by 1990, http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html . It’s likely doubled again since.

Ramasb and Kohler, 2007, say:
<blockquote>Negative estimates have even been reported for technologies when they have been subject to costly regulatory restrictions over time (e.g. nuclear, …”

Schrattenholzer (2001) survey the evidence for energy technologies, showing that, in line with the more general results mentioned earlier, unit cost reductions of 20% associated with doubling of capacity has been typical for energy generation technologies, with the exception of nuclear power.</blockquote>”
http://www.eprg.group.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/eprg0723.pdf .

According to Rangel and Leveque, 2013, ‘<i>Revisiting the Nuclear Power Construction Costs Escalation Curse</i>’ nuclear has averaged 4% cost increase per doubling in France and US. http://idei.fr/doc/conf/eem/papers_2013/leveque.pdf ,
http://www.energypolicyblog.com/2013/01/27/revisiting-the-cost-escalation-curse-of-nuclear-power-new-lessons-from-the-french-experience/ ,
http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/research/researchPrograms/TransitionstoNewTechnologies/06_Grubler_French_Nuclear_WEB.pdf (Figure 3)

Clearly something is preventing the cost reduction rates of other electricity generation technologies from applying to nuclear power. It’s regulatory ratcheting and the financial risk because of the damaging litigation the anti-nukes cause to the operators. There is a very high financial risk premium, which in turn is caused by the public’s irrational nuclear paranoia and the anti-nuke activists.

Allowable Radiation limits are set at the ‘<i>As Low As Reasonably Achievable</i>’ (ALARA) level instead of at the ‘<i>As High As Relatively Safe</i>’ (AHARS) level http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=15900&page=0 . Raising the limits could be the catalyst to get people to rethink the causes of their fear of nuclear power, http://home.comcast.net/~robert.hargraves/public_html/RadiationSafety26SixPage.pdf .

The US deregulation of drilling for oil and gas provides a relevant example of the effect of freeing up the private sector to innovate and compete. ‘<i>The Driving Force Behind the US Oil Boom<i/>’ http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Driving-Force-Behind-the-US-Oil-Boom.html shows how competition and innovation in all sizes of organisation down to the smallest niche specialists is reducing the costs. The same will happen when nuclear is appropriately deregulated.