How quickly can nuclear and wind generation be built, and how expensive / cheap is it compared to wind energy?

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Hugh Sharman wrote:

>> Nuclear may be cheap to run; I have no expertise in that area.  But
>>  it is brutally expensive and slow to build.
Paul M wrote:

> £1270 a kilowatt according to MIT and £6/MWh to run
The main problem there being that you can’t contract MIT to build a
nuclear plant for you at that price.  If you ask the people who *can*
build you a plant, they’ll give you a build price quite a lot higher
than that.  As Florida Power & Light (ca. £4000/kW), and Canada
(£5000+/kW) have recently found out.  And nuclear build costs continue
to escalate: when countries start competing for limited supply capacity,
and industry bottlenecks squeeze tighter, costs will rise further.

Then there are the escalating costs for waste handling.  What are they
now, in the UK? Around £93bn or so? The end cost remains unknown.

And unknowable costs for insurance [1].

Paul M also wrote:

> Bet you 20% nuclear energy on grid can be built a lot quicker than
> same from wind
For Britain to get 20% of its electricity from onshore wind would
require about 45GWp built.  Last year America installed 9GWp of onshore
wind.  So Britain’s 45GWp could be done by 2017, based on 6GWp per year,
which would be before *any* new British nuclear came online, and would
not require manufacturing to be put onto a war-footing.

We’ve already got 3.8GWp built, 2GWp being built now, and 6.8GWp of
onshore + offshore that’s shovel-ready.  Production rates on new
turbines can be ramped up within 2 years.

Energy payback time for a turbine is about 9 months, and carbon payback
time is tiny.  And we’d start saving carbon from the moment the
first one gets connected to the grid, which means huge cumulative
reductions in GHG emissions between now and 2017.
Contribution from new nuclear in the same time: no reductions to
emissions at all.  Indeed, it could well be that our nuclear output
drops significantly in that time.

How many GWp of *net* new nuclear was been brought online, globally,
this century? It’s below 15GW, isn’t it (at least it was to 2008)?  And
how many in the decade before – ie between 1990-1-1 and 1999-12-31? I
think it’s less than 30GW, but I could be wrong.  Nuclear in Europe has
to run pretty fast just to stay in the same place, right now, given the
rate of plant closures, let alone produce any net increase in capacity.
And finally, on a related point: how long do new nuclear plants
typically take to ramp up to a 90% annual load factor?
Regards,
Andrew, London Analytics
[1] more on insurance:

Insurance subsidies include the British taxpayer providing free
indemnification for companies doing nuclear waste disposal, which even
covers incidents *caused* by the company doing the waste disposal.  Now,
it seems to me that if the waste disposal company can cut costs by
reducing safety, then given the government will bail out the
consequences for free, we are directing the profit motive to a rather
dangerous and stupid direction.

Now, as I think we all agree, much of the market for energy has
distortions and failures.  But the one really striking thing about
nuclear is that if all the costs were internalised, and the market
completely liberated, it’s the one technology that the private sector
would never provide.  The private sector will build wind, wave, tidal,
solar, geothermal, and biomass when the carbon price is right.  But only
governments can get nuclear built: only they can pick a loser on that
scale.  We even needed a Vienna Convention to limit liability, in order
to ensure private operators would be willing to go anywhere near running
a nuclear plant.