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> though that goes down to about 4% if you include the energy cost of building the power plant, enriching the fuel, etc. Rereading this, I don't know in what sense it could be true. What I was thinking of was that the cost of energy from a nuclear power plant is on the order of ten times as many dollars as the cost of the fuel, largely as a result of the costs of building it, which represents a sort of inefficiency. However, what's being consumed inefficiently there isn't energy; it's things like concrete, steel, human attention, bulldozer time, human lives, etc., collectively "money". If, as implied by my 4% figure, what was being consumed by the plant construction were actually 22.5x as much energy as comes out of the plant over its lifetime, rather than money, its ERoEI would be about 0.044. It would require the lifetime output of twenty or thirty 100-megawatt power plants to construct a single 100-megawatt nuclear power plant. That is not the case. In fact, as I explained later down in the same comment, the ERoEI of nuclear energy is generally accepted to be in the range of about 10 to 100. |