Aug 4 2010
A recent report titled, ‘Solar and Nuclear Costs—The Historic Crossover: Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy’ written by John O. Blackburn, Duke University’s Professor Emeritus of Economics and former Chancellor, and his student Sam Cunningham claim that electricity produced by solar installations have become cheaper than the electric power produced by the nuclear power plants, and details the estimated fall in the cost of solar power installations while the cost of nuclear power installations tend to rise more.
According to the report, currently the electric power generated, utilizing solar PV modules by private developers is vended to the government owned utilities at a cost of 14 cents or even less per kilowatt hour (kWh), while the price of the power produced by the nuclear plants at their embryonic stages costs more than 14 to 18 cents per kWh. The report further talks about how, the expenditure estimate on recent nuclear plants increased to $10 billion range per reactor from the initial investment of $2 billion range per reactor due to variation in design, and other engineering problems met with, during the construction process.
But this report was discarded and rebutted by Rod Adams in his Atomic Insights Blog which found fault with the very basis of the study, as trusting the expense predictions made by a lone researcher with uncertain credentials, and produced a list of qualified research papers made on the subject, that are not included in the Blackburn’s report.
Source: http://www.duke.edu/