Wow!! DOE To Appropriate A Whole $170 MILLION To Solar Research!!

[hatrack]

Of course, that's over three years - and subject to Congressional approval, naturally.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said on Wednesday it would offer US$170 million to public and private partnerships to make solar energy more competitive with conventional electricity sources by 2015.

The funding would be for three years, beginning in fiscal-year 2007. It would require industry-led teams to match each dollar the government gives them toward the project, which could generate an additional US$170 million.

The US Energy Department said projects would need to focus on improving so-called photovoltaic cell technology which produces energy when exposed to light.

"We will be asking the winning partnerships to focus their work on new manufacturing techniques as well as new component designs that will allow us to bring down the cost of producing photovoltaic fuel cells as quickly as possible," said US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/37046/story.htm

[displacedtexan]

1. That's way less than a Happy Meal per person. eom

[phantom power]

6. That's not even a fountain drink.

[MADem]

2. But we spend a BILLION plus a week in Eye-Rack....NT

[PA Democrat]

3. Less than what is spent on the occupation of Iraq in a single day!

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-08-26-iraq-war-clock_x.htm

[Child_Of_Isis]

4. subject to Congressional approval...

That's the end of that.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. While Sanyo invests $350M in ONE plant ... nt

[JohnWxy]

7. Nuclear Industry to Receive More Than $10 Billion in Tax Breaks and Subsid

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm?ID=1972


WASHINGTON, D.C. – In a new cost analysis of the Senate energy bill, Public Citizen today said that the nuclear industry would stand to gain more than $10.1 billion in subsidies and tax breaks, as well as unlimited taxpayer-backed loan guarantees and other incentives.

“The government should not be promoting the construction of new reactors, which will only add to the nuclear waste and security problems while costing taxpayers billions,” said Wenonah Hauter, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. “The nuclear industry is demanding cradle-to-grave subsidies, and the Senate energy bill is an attempt to give it to them.”

The $10.1 billion includes $5.7 billion in production tax credits and $4.4 billion in various subsidies, but does not include the potential costs of loan guarantees or the Price-Anderson Act, which puts taxpayers on the hook for potentially billions in cleanup costs in the event of a major accident or terrorist attack on a reactor.

The production tax credits equal 1.8 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity from new reactors (up to 6,000 megawatts) during the first eight years of operation – costing $5.7 billion through 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration. However, only $278 million through 2016 is counted in the $18 billion in tax breaks in the bill, because most of the nuclear credits would be claimed after 2016. This means that the true cost of all the tax breaks, including those for non-nuclear industries, is more than $24 billion.

Separately, the loan guarantees in the Senate bill could prove extremely costly to taxpayers. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the risk of loan default by industry would be very high – “well above 50 percent” – leaving the public to pay as much as 80 percent of the cost of building a reactor. This provision authorizes “such sums as are necessary,” but if Congress were to appropriate funding for loan guarantees covering six nuclear reactors, this subsidy could potentially cost taxpayers $6 billion (assuming a 50 percent default rate and construction cost per plant of $2.5 billion, as the CBO has

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Nuclear power - "too cheap to meter" -

[NNadir]

8. Ten billion dollars for nuclear energy is "too cheap to meter."

Nuclear energy produces on an exajoule scale for that money.

This may come as a surprise, but in many places, people consider return on investment.

I certainly would love to have 300 billion dollars thrown at the problem of energy, and I'd love to see solar power well supported, but to the limit it can produce.

There is a fantasy among people who don't understand science, that if you throw money at something, it will work.

This link describes solar research from almost 10 years ago. Solar PV power is 50 years old. It still doesn't produce a single exajoule of the 440 produced on earth. It doesn't even produce as much as ethanol, which produces 0.2 exajoules, in spite of tens of billions in politically motivated subsidies.

http://gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/reshor/rh-sf97/solar.htm

Nuclear power produces 30 exajoules of primary energy on earth, about 9 of them in the United States. If the ethanol subsidy is ten billion, it is about 2% as efficient on return as an investment in nuclear power.

Nuclear power is safer, cleaner and cheaper than solar energy, especially in the case - routinely ignored by solar energy mystics = that involves batteries. However solar energy is still desirable, inasmuch as it can do what nuclear can't do, provide peak load power. This is a synergy situation, not a competitive situation. Still the fact remains that the United States is now an impoverished country, having most of the world's debt. The reason that the world doesn't pull cards out of the house of cards is probably that everyone is frightened about what will happen to everyone's big investment in the US. But it cannot last. Therefore the United States, to the meager extent that sober and realistic people still exist there - and this would not include the proponents of the ethanol shell game - make as many wise investments as possible.

In fact, nuclear energy is the only new form of energy discovered and scaled to an industrial (exajoule) level in the last 100 years. It is the only form of energy available on an exajoule that does not lead to widespread loss of life and the complete destruction of entire ecosystems. It is dense energy, involving low mass investment and even lower land investment. Thus investments in nuclear energy are exceptionally wise. I have not deviated at all from my support of a massive government funded program to build 500 nuclear power plants in this country. Such an investment would represent infrastructure and be the kind of investment that gives returns. This does not mean that I would oppose a few tens of billions of dollars invested in solar PV - maybe if we take the money out of the less promising ethanol subsidy.

One of the intellectual and moral dodges used by anti-nuclear people - not one of whom seems to understand either risk or energy - is to ignore the scale of energy. It is nice to pretend if you're an ethanol lobbyist that 10 billion dollars is OK for a trivial petajoules, while 10 billion dollars for exajoules is somehow not. In fact the anti-nuclear squad routinely inflates the size of nuclear subsidies while minimizing the other subsidies. The largest energy subsidy now in place is the occupation of Iraq, which is a subsidy not only in dollars, but in destroyed flesh.

Unfortunately global climate change is not a game.

I am still waiting to find out, by the way, why people are so obsessed with Strauss's 1954 phrase "too cheap to meter," as applied to nuclear energy. I have noted that there is not one renewable energy advocate on this site who can claim that any form of energy is too cheap to meter. I note that the busbar cost of the Catawba nuclear station is possibly the cheapest electrical energy produced on earth, especially if external costs are included. (That would be $18/MW-hr.) Solar energy in particular is still largely the province of rich people. Mostly it is wholly dependent on huge tax subsidies - and still doesn't produce very much energy. It is politically popular, but not very productive. Poor people do not invest in big consumerist solar systems. In fact the entire renewable game is for middle class or rich spoiled brats.

Of those who posit the nuclear vs. solar question as "either/or" not one of these people seems to have a remote grasp of what energy is, where it comes from, what its risks are, how it is used and how it is produced. They seem to think it is produced by prayer.

I note that ethanol and biofuels and solar PV have all proved far less viable than their proponents claimed over the last five decades. In fact they are essentially trivial industries, in spite of all the noise made about them.

[iconoclastNYC]

9. Pretty stupid if you ask me.

What they need to do is go to solar companies and say.... Let us help you build factories.

Economies of scale will drop the price of solar. So let's get the government involved in building more factories. Give the solar companies interest free loans to use building larger plants with better economies of scale.

[lindisfarne]

10. If nuclear is so great, why won't companies invest without government

subsidies and guarantees they won't be held responsible for clean=up afterwards? Solar and wind can go a long way to cutting back on greenhouse gases (either slightly better or slightly worse than nuclear, depending on whose data you look at and whether it takes into account total lifetime greenhouse gases, including decommissioning nuclear power plants and nuclear waste storage) and they don't have the huge risks and huge start-up costs and time that nuclear does.

[Dead_Parrot]

11. Whoop-de-fucking-doo

We're Saved!