[ RadSafe ] Cost of electricity generation

[Eric.Goldin at sce.com]

Some folks were recently asking about the cost of electricity generation.
NEI just announced some stats for the year 2006 that might be of interest.
In the US last year, electricity generated by nuclear cost 1.66 cents/kWh.
(I'm not going to even attempt to convert kWh to any SI units).  Those are
production costs that include fuel and O&M (operations and maintenance).
If you add decommissioning costs, taxes, and capital additions, nuclear is
still at about 2.5 cents/kWh.  Compare the 1.66 cents/kWh to natural gas
production costs at 7.5 cents/kWh (thanks to the high demand since much of
the new US generation is natural gas fired).  Last I heard, coal was around
1.9 cents.  Nuclear capacity factors were just under 90% and I don't
believe any generation can come close to that.

Eric M. Goldin, CHP
<Eric.Goldin at sce.com>