Wikipedia: "The total cost of the Shelter Implementation Plan, of which the New Safe Confinement is the most prominent element, is estimated to be around €2.15 billion (US$2.3 billion). The New Safe Confinement alone accounts for €1.5 billion."

Tell me again nuclear power is cheap.

Take the number of baseline gigawatts produced by nuclear over the last x years, for any value of x you care to pick. Divide by the total cost over the same period (under the same safety standards, or equivalently the same price per person killed - falling off a roof installing a solar panel can kill you just as dead as radiation can). Compare to any other power source you care to pick.

Nuclear power is cheap.

Nuclear power, at least in Europe, is only cheap as the nation states serve as insurers. The costs in the event of an accident are so high that noone wants to insure them.

And coal power is so cheap because everyone pays the price. Everyone everywhere. Coal electricity have enormous negative externalities: health, quality of live, the aggregated economic cost is enormous, and will increase exponentially.

If coal electricity users actually paid the real cost it would dwarf nuclear cost.

  > Nuclear power is only cheap as the nation states serve as insurers

EDF, who are preparing to construct Hinkley Point's planned nuclear power station, have been guaranteed a minimum strike price of £92.50/MWh. The mean wholesale price is currently around £46/MWh.

Even disregarding the risk/cost of accident cleanup, nuclear power isn't necessarily cheap or unsubsidized.

...and how is this different from the costs of global warming and other features of fossil fuels?

The costs are not visible to the user of the fuel but put on the nation states and future generations.

Two can play this game!

"Hurricane Katrina caused $81 billion in property damages, but it is estimated that the total economic impact in Louisiana and Mississippi may exceed $150 billion"

Tell me again dirty power is cheap.

I am not sure what's your point, but Hurricane Katrina was not a human-made catastrophe.

Building anything that would be hazardous if destroyed on a below sea level area that is known to be hit by hurricanes was.

But you are somewhat right. Katrina is a better comparison with Fukishima which, to my knowledge, was a combination of being a poor location and repeated environmental damage that wasn't properly repaired or maintained. The 2015 Tianjin explosion is a better comparison with Chernobyl as that was human error and poor maintenance, not "act of god" weather.

Aren't you thinking about Deepwater Horizon, the BP platformk oilspill - not Hurrican Katrina?

Oh, there are plenty of examples of traditional fossil fuels failing due to human error or just being built in really stupid locations.

But I was specifically referring to the idea that Katrina was completely different as there was no human error involved in there.

Yes, let's use the worst possible example of reactor design and operation (negligence in both cases) as the exemplar.

Besides which, nobody said nuclear power was cheap (not lately), but it is safe. Even with Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power causes vastly fewer deaths per unit of delivered power than other methods, especially coal (one of the most common sources of power in the world).

Chernobyl could produce 4GW of power before the accident. Solar currently costs about $3/watt, so the equivalent solar installation would cost $12 billion, and that's ignoring the part where solar generates less in bad weather and nothing at night.

Traditional nuclear power plants are very expensive, but that's because they're huge.

For 100 years only. In 2116 we might need a new shelter on top of this?

We probably will.

Figuring out the actual time until Chernobyl is safe is pretty difficult as most resources are highly politicized (I wonder why...) and there are certain REALLY hot spots, but considering the high profile nature of it: even when it reaches safe and reasonable levels of radiation, people are going to be afraid of it.

But here is a pretty decent, if not overly scientific, resource to get an idea of things http://chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-lev...

For good chunks of it, it is safe enough for humans. Not great, but if there were a pressing concern, people could live there (keeping away from the remaining problems) comfortably (seriously, you would be amazed at background radiation levels in a lot of residential areas). But there is no pressing reason to, and there are definitely some spots you would want to stay the hell away from.

Fukishima, Three Mile Island, and Hiroshima/Nagasaki are cases where there IS a pressing reason for people to live there, so standards are much lower/more reasonable/whatever.

And we will keep doing this for the next 20,000 years or so.

The surrounding area will be safe long before that but the epicentre will be radioactive for a long time and there is nothing we can really do about it.

Within the next 20,000 years we'll get to the point where the improvement of technology and our desire to get rid of the goddamn stuff will overcome the incredible cost of blasting it out of the solar system for good.

In < 50 years well have robots or remotely controlled robots that can go in there and clean it up.

We've tried this before:

- "Fukushima robot stranded after stalling inside reactor" [1]

- "the robot could remain ambulatory in the radiation field for only 50 minutes, and in fact the robot's lower portion was no longer responding to commands" [2]

Poor robots, always being sent in to die alone.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/13/fukushim...

[2] http://phys.org/news/2005-12-mighty-mouse-robot-frees-stuck....

That's why I gave a 50 year window.

Today, we don't quite have the ability.

In the future, we will.

The foot will be mined and processed into fuel within the next 20 years. At that stage the surrounding pristine wildlife haven that the countryside reverted to in the absence of humans will again degenerate into the usual suburban death zone, filled with humans, cats dogs, and almost nothing else.

Well soviet nuclear power obviously isn't, which is about the only expensive thing they ever did.

I'd say their space program wasn't cheap, either. Their ICBM program was also up there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_%28missile%29).