However, if a corporation can realize returns of anything above their cost of capital they should be able to raise this from the market. Companies with access to returns above their cost of capital should not be capital constrained and hence can invest not only in the projects that return 25%, but those that return 24%, 23%, 22%, etc.

However, I dispute this statement "The floor now for projects is more around 15-20% ROI". No one in the world has access to a steady stream of projects with an expected return of 15 - 20% unless they are very risky.

This theology is the heart of our problem: the debt-and-interest financial system that requires endless "growth" to survive.  Without a new paradigm we're doomed.

Here's the link to a paper I wrote in an attempt to outline the paradigm of an organic economic system. An organic economy is an economy that does not require perpetual growth (an impossibility on a finite earth) , but balances the forces of growth and decline.

The Organic Economy

Worth repeating.  Making some past culture your latest and greatest mental refuge (religion) is silly.  Our ancestors were just as cut-throat as us.

Otherwise The Mother of Nature would be looking on a group of Homo Saps doing something Other than making plans to gor at eachothers throat and ask questions later.

Would you PLEASE email the Midwest Renewable Energy Association at:  info@the-mrea.org ???

(please just once though or they get quit owly at you - "pest" stone repelant they use (organic even)

PLEASE talk to them.  Like the NewAge Repbulicans, myself and the EcoCulturally Correct, we have the SAME GOALS (goals - like in tag as a kid).

But I feel their (MREA) good intentions only serve to CLOUD the rode to HAdes we are now Paving In Progress...

We have oil that can power our civilisation for 10 year, NG for 20 years, coal for 100 years, uranium/thorium for many thousands of years, while wind could at least partioally power it indefinately (after you factor out the resources you need to build it). It is the availability and the impact of the resources we use that matter.

Even economicaly - just look 20 years ahead. Price of oil will probably be in the stratosphere, NG and coal will be somewhere above the clouds, while uranium will still be cheap. Because it is abundant, and we will not have to worry about it in the next several thousand years.

First there is a question of arithmetic--adding up how much capacity is needed. I see no evidence that you have done this.

Second there is the question of whether coal and nuclear are complementary or competitive approaches. Clearly, they are complementary. Again, doing the simple column addition, how much added capacity is going to be needed (on reasonable demand projections) over the next ten two twenty years? After you have done this computation, please find me one knowledgeable coal person who claims that coal alone can do this.

Third: If coal is so great, why don't the French and Japanese use more of it? They have good ports and if it made any economic sense (which it does not) they could have opted to import huge quantitities of coal rather than going nuclear.

I look forward to seeing your computations.

Because the same people that talk about "power down" and a return to the pastoral living of shepherds in the loans of ex-suburbia, will be the first that will start screaming when homo sapiens begins eating itself and the whole planet alongside, trying to protect what it has now.

Insurance is not an especially effective way to handle very large and very uncommon accidents. How do you correctly size the insurance funds? How do you keep them liquid, where are they to be invested and what is to be done with the raw economical power those massive funds will have?

I use to advocate that a large number of nuclear power producers, preferably all of them, should agree to write contracts with a clause to all raise their prices with 0.1 cent after a major accident and use the massive money flow to compensate victims and work with decontamination etc. This would create a money flow that could pay for any reasonably sized relief effort for manny years.

The point is that nuclear is much less dependant on fossil fuel subsidy than the proposed alternatives.
Compare the numbers:

To review, nuclear power plants built in the 1970's used 40 metric tons of steel, and 190 cubic meters of concrete, for each megawatt of average capacity. For comparison, modern wind energy systems, with good wind conditions, take 460 metric tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete per megawatt.

Source (pdf): http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/news/CEC/CEC_Nuclear_Workshop_PFP_8=051.pdf

To replace US electricity generation system with wind turbines we are going to need some 4500 GW of capacity, correspondent to 3 mln.middle sized turbines (or 1 mln. offshore turbines). This would translate into some:
~ 2070 mln. tonnes of steel;
~ 3915 mln.m^3 of concrete (40 years of total US production!)
~ Enormous amounts of composites, wires, pavement for access roads etc.
~ Undefined amount of (yet to be invented/developed) energy storage
Even worse though, each year we will need to recycle 3 to 5% of them due to amortisation.

In comparison 700GW of nukes would require:
~ 28 mln tonnes of steel
~ 133 mln.m^3 of concrete (1.3 years of US production)
~ Much less additional infrastructure because we can place them wherever we want.

The numbers are 30 to 80 times lower! Do I need to comment?

Regarding nuclear safety - I think we are very close to producing a self regulating plant design. It can only get better there, unless we are headed for a nuclear rush build up, which to be worried about. Already incidents of the type the public fears (Chernobil type) are practically impossible in contemporary water moderated reactors - if the core gets overheated the water turns to steam and steam does not slow neutrons well; the result is that fission slows very fast and will finally stop even if the control rods or/and cooling system are out of order.

Lower EROEI indirectly means smaller scalability. This is clearly seen in the tar sands production where restricted inputs are straing the production. With poor sources there will soon come a time that the net additions of capacity are hardly able to keep with the capacity that stops working because of amortisations. Clearly - there are limits that will soon be met.

As for electricity being a better source, if so why are we talking about Peak Oil?