Progress Energy Florida is going to have to spend more than originally planned to build two nuclear reactors in Levy County, the utility’s top executive said.
The St. Petersburg-based utility won’t disclose how much more expensive the project will be until it’s presented to state regulators within 90 days. Based on new industry estimates, the revised cost could be two to three times more expensive than the projection Progress issued more than a year ago.
But based on new industry estimates, the tab for Progress Energy’s project could surpass $10 billion, well above the company’s initial estimate of $5 billion to $7 billion.
FPL, based in Juno Beach, said recently that the “overnight cost” of its two-reactor project would range from $12 billion to $18 billion, more than twice as high as Progress Energy’s December 2006 estimate. Overnight estimates exclude the interest paid on the loan and are based on commodity prices when the estimate is made.
The FPL project may be the best measuring stick, because FPL is considering the same Westinghouse technology Progress Energy has selected, and the capacity of each two-reactor project is about the same: 2,200 megawatts, enough energy for 1.3 million homes.
What’s more, Moody’s Investors Service, one of three major rating agencies, said in October that new reactors would cost up to $6,000 per kilowatt of capacity to build. At that price, Progress Energy’s two-reactor proposal would cost $13.2 billion. FPL’s recent estimate was $3,100 to $4,500 a kilowatt.
– from www.tmia.com
Keep in mind, that those are only the start up costs. What about the costs to dispose of the nuclear waste? What about the costs if that nuclear waste falls into the wrong hands like a terrorists hands, or the hands of your kids drinking from a glass of water? I went to a lecture in Newburyport, MA about the Seabrook Nuclear power plant. The lecture said a few disturbing things:
1). The nuclear power companies and EPA are in bed together. The EPA doesn’t protect us anymore, they are simply there to give the power companies whatever they want. They from what I heard, they altered the results of one study by changing the sample area of subjects to include counties. By including more counties than just the one that the plant was in, it made the cancer rates look normal. If you only included the town with the plant in it, cancer rates were off the charts.
2). Power plants regularly release radioactive waste into water. Thanks to the EPA there is no limit to the amount of waste they can release, just the rate by which they dillute it. You can release 5 tons of radioactive waste a day if you dillute it with enough water.
3). A recent study shows that no ammount of radiation is ‘safe’. Any amount increases your risk of cancer. The more radiation, the more cancer, all the way down to one incident of exposure. Thats why its troubling when I hear that Seabrook released a plume of radiation 17 times the background rate into the atmosphere. They denied the spike for months, but then finally admited that they had a release that night but there is no way that their release caused the spike. Thank goodness there are civilian watchdog groups that monitor radiation levels from multiple locations in Seabrook, the plant would never tell us that they could be killing us.
5). LASTLY, at 1-4 million dollars a piece, think of how many wind turbines we could by for $13.2 BILLION dollars. My basic math tells me that we could get, at least 10,000 turbines that produce free energy after thier 5-7 year payback period.
To Recap:
Turbines don’t produce waste for which we have no safe storage.
Wind turbines don’t poison water supplies.
People don’t lie to cover up the mistakes that turbines don’t have.
Turbines also don’t Melt down
Wind doesn’t forcing the evacuation of an entire city like Chernobyl.
They don’t cause birth defects.
Turbines don’t release radiactive particles into the atmosphere which accumulate in grass which then concentrate into cows, which we eat.