Atom Power Wins Against Coal

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30820, 4 August 1965, Page 7

Atom Power Wins Against Coal

{Special Correspondent N.Z.P.A.)

LONDON, August 2. For the first time nuclear power in Britain is competitive with coal-powered stations.

This, says the “Guardian,” is the significance of the Atomic Power Constructions’ winning tender for the Dungeness second generation nuclear power station. The newspaper says a typical coal-fired station generates electricity in its early years for about .54d a kilowatt hour; oil can do it for ,52d. The margins are very narrow but nuclear power has the greater scope for improvement. If nuclear power is put on the same footing as conventional stations and depreciated over 30 years instead of 20 years and runs at 75 per cent load working, the cost a kilowatt hour drops to .41d. Dungeness is unique in other ways. It is the first time the Central Electricity Generating

Board has had the chance to compare different nuclear power techniques and for the first time it has competed internationally—A.P.C.’s chief rival was the Americandesigned boiling-water reactor from the Nuclear Power Group and International General Electric.

Nuclear power’s great virtue is that once installed it was relatively easy to run, clean and had very low operating costs, the newspaper says, but its capital cost far outweighs that of conventional stations and “capital is one thing this country is not long on.” Quite apart from capital hunger, displacing coal was a tendentious social issue and one also had to bear in mind the possibility of discovering natural gas in the North Sea.