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“Nuclear power plants are extremely costly to build, but Wizards argue that putting CCS in coal plants drives up construction costs to the point where a new nuclear plant and a new coal plant have about the same price tag. And once they are running, most scientists say, nuclear plants have proven more reliable, cheaper, and safer than coal plants. Because terms like “reliable,” “cheaper,” and “safer” can be vague, let me explain what engineers and physicists mean by them. In general, these people support nuclear power, so what follows is effectively a positive brief for it. Reliability is measured by “capacity factor,” the fraction of the time that the power plant is actually sending out electricity at its maximum rate. For U.S. coal plants, the capacity factor is less than 60 percent. Meanwhile, nuclear’s capacity factor is 90 percent, higher than any other type of energy (solar photovoltaics, for instance, are rated at less than 30 percent). Decades of experience have shown that once a nuclear plant is turned on, it tends to run quite reliably, with the main downtime being maintenance breaks. Cheapness refers to the price for a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Nuclear power is based, famously, on splitting the nucleus of uranium atoms. The nucleus breaks into two pieces that fly away from each other, releasing a lot of energy as they do. The energy is roughly a million times more than the chemical energy one would obtain by burning the same atom. Because of this greater energy density, nuclear plants need much less fuel to produce a given amount of electricity than fossil-fuel plants. As a result, nuclear facilities have proven to be less expensive to operate than any other type of power plant except hydroelectric dams. By far the biggest cost is constructing the plant. After that, actually making the electricity is cheap. Safety usually is measured by the number of deaths in the “energy chain”—that is, how many people are killed by the entire cycle, from exploration and mining to refining and transportation to actual power generation, as well as waste treatment and disposal. Deaths from mining uranium are counted, as well as deaths from falling off roofs while installing solar panels (a surprisingly big number). Adding these together, a research team at the Paul Scherrer Institute, Switzerland’s biggest research center, reckoned in 2016 that nukes thus far have caused fewer deaths than any other power source except, again, hydroelectric dams (wind power was pretty close). Coal had thirty to a hundred times the impact on human health in normal operations. Nuke boosters say, accurately, that nuclear plants kill people only in rare, awful accidents like Chernobyl (even in the frightening 2011 meltdown at Fukushima, radiation is not known to have caused a single fatality). Coal plants around the world kill millions of people every year in normal operation. In addition, nuclear plants take up less land than other sorts of utilities. An often-cited study of U.S. plants by Nature Conservancy researchers in 2009 concluded that nuclear power uses about four times less land per unit of energy than coal and about fifteen times less than solar arrays.” — The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World by Charles C. Mann https://a.co/fRpeeTW