Nuclear is an alternative - with extemely heavy political brakes on. Until people can agree on what to do with the waste and that Pu is not evil if managed properly and fuel recycling is established (which would be economically devastating for Uranium mining...) nuclear is not a viable option.

And now we factor in the growth and projected price slump of PV... by the time nuclear lifts a leg, PV and conservation have run circles around the block.

In a year or two PV will deliver the equivalent of one nuclear reactor a year. At a 30% growth rate that looks like follows:

2008. 1.0 reactor, cumulative 2.0 reactors
      
2009. 1.3 reactors, cumulative 3.3 reactors
      
2010. 1.7 reactors, cumulative 5.0 reactors
      
2011. 2.2 reactors, cumulative 7.2 reactors
      
2012. 2.9 reactors, cumulative 10.1 reactors
      
2013. 3.7 reactors, cumulative 13.8 reactors
      
2014. 4.8 reactors, cumulative 18.6 reactors
      
2015. 6.2 reactors, cumulative 24.8 reactors
      
2016. 3.3 reactors, cumulative 28.1 reactors
      
2017. 8.2 reactors, cumulative 36.3 reactors
      
2018. 10.6 reactors, cumulative 46.9 reactors
      
2019. 13.8 reactors, cumulative 60.7 reactors
      
2020. 17.9 reactors, cumulative 78.6 reactors

Which politician wants to run on the nucleat ticket?

I assume this is total Capital construction and operating costs to provide electricity at rates you quote.  If your costs are only construction than the monthly consumable cost on coal and NG are variables that will increase in the future.

In any case what the costs don't include are the carbon implications (that you show need to be included for parity with wind) but also the unseen costs of obtaining the coal and NG supply.  IMHO one of the reasons coal is so cheap is that the environmental impacts of coal mining are delayed way into the future.  Before 1981 or '82 strip mining operations had 7 years to return the land to similar vegetation as before mining.  Under the Reagan administration that time frame was delayed to (I think) 20 years.  This means a lot of natural weathering can occur on the spoils piles before they need to be re-vegetated. I remember this because I interviewed at a company that had a huge business in using plants to reclaim disturbed land.  They went bankrupt 5 years or so later because their entire business model disappeared.

The reason the 7 years was tough on strip miners is that you need specialized plants to be the first communities to establish.  Lots of heavy metals and acids that require phytosequestration to clean up the soil allowing conventional plants to grow.  After twenty years the soils are leeched and lots of stuff will grow.  The problem is, where does the leech water go?  It may run off or it may be contained and go down.  In all cases it is going to impact aquafers negatively.  These costs are then picked up by entities other than the miners. This keeps the cost of coal cheap but adds to the other problems of burning coal

Don't get me wrong, I think coal mining is a valid way to provide energy.  I am just of the opinion that it can be done in a much less ecologically destructive way, albeit at a higher cost.  But the rules and framework have to apply (and apply to all) or there is no incentive for the operations that want to do things right.  They have a lot of added costs without being able to ask more for the coal.  More likely the price for coal will go down if we allow the "most efficient" ways of extraction to be used without regard to down stream consequences.

The economics argument is useless. We are talking about politics here. If the voter votes for it, clean energy is going to be built, even if it costs 10 cents more per kWh.

I certainly can afford to pay that much. So can many others.

At the same price as Sizewell B
I guess if these wind turbines are built by the same guys that built Sizewell B the price tag will be ~40bn. The Russians are builfing their nukes for $1.5-2 bln/a reactor, so I suggest invite them to build the wind turbines too.

Your point about wind turbines is a straw man, and irrelevant as such.

The people who build wind turbines in the North Sea, will be the same people who built offshore oil structures in the North Sea.  The turbine part is a fast-developing, but proven technology.  The construction part has been proven, but in a different industry, with different applications.

It's worth noting: the private sector will finance offshore wind structures (with appropriate subsidies reflecting carbon costs), it will not finance nuclear power stations without effective guarantees from the central government.

On Sizewell B I was actually a little offended by that remark.  The nuclear builders I met were professional and careful engineers.  It was the first (and so far only) British pressurised water reactor, and so there was not the advantage of learning efficiencies.

Sizewell C, had it been built, might have cost half as much.  But that would have necessitated maintaining the Non Fossil Fuel Obligation (the 'nuclear levy') and the pressure from consumers and industry was for lower electricity tariffs.

The technology is expensive on a life cycle cost basis.  You can't avoid that conclusion, however much you seek to blame it on individuals and organisations.

The Russians:

- given they orchestrated some of the worst environmental crimes of the 20th century, and the worst nuclear accident ever recorded, I don't trust them to build nuclear reactors.  Yes we are in a post-Soviet world, but this is still a society which is not open, obsessively secretive and centrally controlled, has no reference to minority stakeholder and shareholder rights.  Not the people with whom to entrust a sensitive and complex technology with longterm environmental consequences.

On $ v. £ costs, however you mark it, the tendency is for UK construction costs (in £s) to equal those (in $s) of other jurisdictions.  There are a host of reasons for this (it's true in housebuilding and commercial construction as well AFAIK) which seem to stem from: the UK's restrictive planning, UK labour practices, high cost of skilled construction labour in the UK v. other countries.

The point then becomes how much of the thing you are building can be manufactured rather than constructed ie fabricated off site.  Manufacturing costs are more or less common across the planet (give or take transport costs).

In the case of a wind turbine, and possibly an offshore structure, a lot.

Less in the case of a nuclear power plant, but hopefully more than was historically the case.

The problem then is if you build a generation of reactors on essentially the same design, manufactured rather than customised on site, then if it turns out that 5,10,25 years down the track there was a design fault you lose all your reactors at once.

So far this hasn't happened to the French.  It has to the Japanese.

(the same is true of a wind farm station, and indeed it has happened, but you can replace an individual unit much more easily)

On nuclear waste: no private sector company could 'solve' it, because no company can take on an unquantifiable liability, infinite in time.  Companies have gone broke because of just that problem (asbestos, toxic chemical dumps etc.).  In the end, this is a pure case of market failure, and you have to have government intervention.

(the same will be true of Carbon Capture and Storage-- the government will have to underwrite the risk of a leak from a long term geologic depository).

I have often said - once the shortages start the plants will be built anyway. I leave it up to you to decide whether the time wasted in meaningless debates now will help them to be built safely.

It is precisely the urge to rush, without adequate attention to building public consensus, which got the nuclear industry into this pickle in the first place, with enormous long tail liabilities.  It was an industry founded in the Cold War, on secretiveness, and on a blind faith in engineering technology.

There is a (good) case for more nuclear.  But if that case is not made, and made correctly (ie not because its cheap, but necessary in an age of Carbon Emission control), then when the first (or second, or third) bumps are hit further down the road, the public support will evaporate.

We could be left with another generation of half-finished nuclear power plants, dotting the landscape.

There needs to be at least a Parliamentary Inquiry, if not a Royal Commission, to build all-party support for the nuclear option.  The government is mistaken to try to do this by stealth, bypassing Parliament.

If we start that process now, then a new generation of plants could be operational by 2020.