Armchair,
3500 bottles in four hours is believable. 20 in 2 hours isn't.

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Fester,
Are you being deliberately disingenuous? Or are you unaware that the reason French nuclear power s so cheap is because the power plants were built n the 1970s so the construction cost was quickly inflated away?

SA uses a lot less gas to generate electricity now than it did before it started using renewables and stopped using coal. More renewables and more batteries mean less reliance on gas.

Aidan,

Exactly. When the comparisons get done it is for twenty years, and I would guess the gas price assumptions for the comparison would be out a bit as well. A well maintained nuclear power plant might last seventy years. Were you to work on those metrics you would see why the French were so sensible in building nuclear power stations.

Fester,
I'm not doubting the French were sensible in building nuclear power stations. But the economics of the present day are very different to those of the 1970s. Nuclear power may have been cheap back then, but it's expensive now. And a 70 year lifespan in VERY optimistic. It may be possible to extend the lifespan that far, but at nowhere near full power.

And the objective is to phase out gas, so natural gas prices are of little relevance to the long term economics of renewable energy. Now the intention is for a large overbuild of renewable energy infrastructure, and to use the surplus to produce hydrogen.

Hey Aiden,
I wasn't necessarily wrong in what I first said.
Part of that pick-up run may includes driving a hour out to nowhere and an hour back (and often does) just to pick up a single bag of 20 bottles.
Other collections on that pick-up run can be somewhat larger.

And it doesn't change my argument though does it?
$70 does not cover 4hrs wages, truck fuel for 150klms and vehicle rental expenses.
The only thing that makes it viable at all is the government subsidies.

An additional cost of nuclear power stations is that as well as waste disposal, once they come to the end of their serviceable life they have to be "mothballed" and kept secure.

They usually can't be pulled down and rebuilt economically but the considerable decommissioning costs have to be paid for by somebody - guess who? The consumer! That's another reason the cost of nuclear powered electricity generation is so high.

As of August 2013, 147 civilian nuclear power reactors had ceased operation in 19 countries so it's a considerable problem.

AC,

Are the bottle people not providing a service, subsidised by government, a bit like public transport. If not recycled the bottles would go to landfill, and there would be an environmental cost in that.