Warmair,

Here is a comparison of the levelized cost of generation across various methods compared directly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LCOE_comparison_fraunhofer_november2013.svg

Coal is still by far the cheapest.

Coal,the cheapest? That's just funny!

Is coal cheap? Not so much if you should double the electricity price to include the health costs! Who pays this cost? You can be sure it’s not the Koch brothers! (American coal barons).

“Although it is difficult to assign a cost to these numbers, estimates have suggested a 10% increase in health care costs in countries where coal makes up a significant fraction of the energy mix, like the U.S. and Europe (NAS 2010; Cohen et al., 2005; Pope et al., 2002). These additional health costs begin to rival the total energy costs on an annual basis for the U.S. given that health care costs top $2.6 trillion, and electricity costs only exceed about $400 billion. Another way to describe this human health energy fee is that it costs about 2,000 lives per year to keep the lights on in Beijing but only about 200 lives to keep them on in New York.

Guess that’s just the cost of doing business…”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/

Harvard University: Coal health impacts cost America at least $300 billion every year (possibly more), the same as another war in Iraq every 6 years! What kind of person claims coal is ‘cheap’!?
http://www.energyandpolicy.org/value-of-solar-versus-fossil-fuels-part-two

Max,

The costs are the costs. Both you and warmair have to add costs to coal to make renewables seem viable. However, to use renewables, you need to have a considerable back up from base load the cost of which needs to be added to the cost of the renewables.

The societal costs are sucked out of someone's thumb, and differ from every source. Next you will be quoting that fruit bat Helen Caldicott.

Shadow
The reason for phasing out coal fired generation is due to the potential risks of climate change. If you don't think thats a problem then it is business as usual, and you better pray that most climate scientists are wrong.

Renewables are not necessarily cheaper or more expensive than coal, for example in most places hydro is cheaper than coal, but solar is definitely more expensive, according to your link given on the top of page 9 onshore wind is competitive with black coal but not lignite in Germany.

It is clear that most attacks on renwables are one dimensional, A renewable is attacked because it will not work at a particular time while happily ignoring that numerous others are still available , It simply proves there is no single ideal source of power, that can cover all our requirements all the time. Natural gas is definitely more expensive than coal, but we still use gas because coal can not be ramped up quickly enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LCOE_comparison_fraunhofer_november2013.svg

The real question is what power sources should replace coal power. The best way of achieving this is to put a price on CO2 emissions, and let the market decide.

In my opinion the answer in Australia is renewables, but I don't not rule nuclear power in other countries, although I suspect nuclear is ultimately a very expensive way of generating power, comes with a load of problems which have not been resolved, and anyway it is not practical for all countries to replace coal power with nuclear power in a useful time frame.

France cleaned up their electricity grid with older generation nukes in under 20 years, and that was with water based nukes requiring high pressure single-cast reactor flange vessels! This is a beast of a pressure cooker that must be cast in one go!

Integral Fast Reactors like GE's PRISM are now up to commercial prototype testing. So while we should accelerate building out AP1000's, the PRISM is a radically different approach to nuclear power that lets them break down the reactor into its modular components and produce them on the assembly line. In other words, without water, even with sodium, reactors can be mass produced. Rather than a single hand crafted Bentley or Rolls Royce, this is more like cheaper Hyundai's. Without the extra health costs of coal (to say nothing of how serious climate change is!), any nuclear grid would be cheaper than coal. But with IFR's coming off the production line, we could see nuclear power really drop in price. AND it works on a cold winter night, AND IFR's burn nuclear waste, AND we have lots of uranium.

Not only this, but Thorcon have a thorium reactor they estimate to be HALF the retail price of coal which would be a QUARTER the FULL cost of coal when one includes coal's health costs. This is probably a while away, but testing should start now. It's not a full BREEDER reactor (that can burn nuclear waste) but only a BURNER. Their emphasis is speed: they want a factory turning these out ASAP. Inherent safety, and plenty of fuel. If I had to guess I would probably say GE's PRISM is far more developed, given they had decades of testing on the EBR2, but this ThorCon presentation looks like a serious attempt to take what they know from the old MSR and turn it into a production-line MSR for today!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfsOYzOpYRw

From a number of statements by warmair with which I disagree, I choose one with which I can partly agree, being " It simply proves there is no single ideal source of power, that can cover all our requirements all the time."

This is an aspect of the "There is no such thing as base-load" mantra. While the statement is true beyond the grid, it makes no sense anywhere else as nuclear modules from large to small can most cheaply serve a grid, given the chance.

The idea of building and maintain massive renewable infrastructure, only to have to supplement it with fossil fuels, seems plain dumb.

If you want to nobble fossil fuels so renewables get a chance, then simultaneously take unnecessary shackles from nuclear, so it can compete. Nuclear will win out on the grid, and perhaps beyond with small modules.

Renewables (excluding hydro) will never win out where unshackled nuclear is an option. Where it is sensible to use them, they will only ever be an extension of the grid.