What's strikes me is that the cost of operating a nuclear plant during its lifetime is actually unknown, making it the expensivest energy source. Why it is still in use : obviously because it serves as base technology and knowledge to build weapons.
Some example of hidden costs not included in nuclear kwh price :
- Cost of managing waste: How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes ?
- Risk prime to insure huge damage that could arise from accident or future leaks in storage area : Again this amount is so big, that this externality has to be socialized.
- Cost of dismantling a plant : Beside one or two exceptions, no plant has been successfully dismantled. All the planning and costs for the currently plan in dismantling are exploding and will take years and tons of capital ... leaving more unmanageable wastes and unusable lands.
All those aspects will become increasingly difficult to manage in countries that made the (bad) choice of going full nuclear a few years ago, like France.
>How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes?
I think we need to be optimists. Not 'glass is half full' optimists, or 'humans are perfect' optimists but 'progress is possible if we keep trying' optimists.
If we decide to be optimists then our wealth, technological capability and sense of responsibility will all continue to increase. Handling historical waste will become safer and cheaper. An exciting future university project, perhaps, with documentaries, museums and spin-offs abounding.
What it isn't possible to do is to prophesy the precise means by which it will happen.
We may build reactors that produce less and less waste or no waste at all. Nuclear engineers and physicists may figure out how to transmute harmful elements into safe ones. We may end up launching material directly into the Sun. Or we might just dig a better hole. Or something else. Or something else again.
The fact that we don't know in advance is not grounds for pessimism.
“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.” (Howard Zinn)
Just because the cost is diffucult (or impossible) to calculate doesn’t mean it’s expensive.
Also, you have to compare the cost of Nuclear to the cost of coal/gas, which is currently the only alternative. Our co2 footprint will kill the planet in 50-100 years - unless you can somehow show that nuclear will kill it sooner, I’d say alternative cost is way higher.
Finally, the cost of doing simething forever (managing nuclear waste) is not infinite. Read up on NPV.
Some example of hidden costs not included in nuclear kwh price :
- Cost of managing waste: How can you evaluate cost of managing basically forever (at the human scale) dangerous wastes ?
- Risk prime to insure huge damage that could arise from accident or future leaks in storage area : Again this amount is so big, that this externality has to be socialized.
- Cost of dismantling a plant : Beside one or two exceptions, no plant has been successfully dismantled. All the planning and costs for the currently plan in dismantling are exploding and will take years and tons of capital ... leaving more unmanageable wastes and unusable lands.
All those aspects will become increasingly difficult to manage in countries that made the (bad) choice of going full nuclear a few years ago, like France.