> The majority of the cost to build the plants are due to the crazy uncertainty about the design/build timeline every-time one is built. Given that conceptually they aren't any more complex than your average coal plant those costs are massively over inflated by a number of factors. Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost.

NIMBYism is a large reason why the risks are so uncertain and the costs so high. When dozens of judges at several levels have jurisdiction to require expensive and time consuming state/federal EPA, zoning, air quality, shading, etc. reviews and plaintiffs can use delay tactics to block appeals to those rulings, you get lots of uncertainty and expense.

Dont get me wrong, i am not anti- nuclear. It just doesnt make sense to me at this point from an economics perspective. When factoring in the cost of waste management and decommissioning the power plants after the end of its lifetime, they are absurdly expensive. All this not to mention the absurd follow-up costs of having to dig out collapsed long time storage yet again. I dont see how nuclear today is not just another technology that offers a unsustainable, quick and cheap energy source that externalized the costs to the next generations. The running costs of all those waste management failures is starting to add up, and when looking at Germany, who set an exit date for nuclear power, the cost of decommissioning the power plants themselves is going to be a massive loss for the tax payer, even if everything would work as planed. Which, when looking at the history, we can be sure it wont.

I am not convinced yet that nuclear doesnt just look good on paper. Get me a realistic calculation for the actual energy price without externalizing the cleanup costs to the tax payer and we can talk. Dont factor in waste management at a fixed price the state offers and dont just assume that no meltdown cleanup will ever be necessary. But i have yet to see anyone make the argument that way, which lets me assume, that nuclear is a wonderful technology to research until someone finds out how to run plants economically viable without just externalizing costs.

I'm not saying it's not problematic, but it's minuscule compared to all forms of power. Even wind power have a serious waste problem when the blades need to be decommissioned. It's not radioactive, but it needs to be stored, and there is a lot of it.

So the question whether we should go full nuclear is, what is the real price on nuclear per kwh with what liabilities? How does it scale? I think the post i responded to first was on an excellent path if it hadnt ignored the waste management problematic. I think research into bringing down cost of power plants is a field worth researching, as well as how to drive down the price of long term storage. But first we have to actually decide on the basis of realistic data and not just hope the future will figure it out for us.

edit: My comment is coming across a bit to hostile, just so there are no misunderstandings, i dont think this societal discussion can be approached by convincing individuals on the internet who are to lazy to google themselves(meaning me), but in parliament. I wasnt really trying to start a discussion but giving my 2cents of where i think the problem in the discourse we currently have lie. And thats more the lacking factual basis in arguments on the topic then the actual costs.

When a nuclear plant releases radiation into the atmosphere we call it a major fuck up. When a coal plant releases dangerous pollutants (including radiation) into the atmosphere we call it normal operation.

> A typical dry-storage cask holds 10 tons of spent fuel and costs about $1 million–$2 million each. (The CASTOR is at the upper end of that range.) This translates to a cost of less than one-twentieth of a penny per kilowatt-hour—about 1 percent of the cost of generating nuclear power.

They last for anywhere between 30-100 years and I assume to be be processed and put into new casks after that. So "less than one-twentieth of a penny per kilowatt-hour" every 30-100 year.

Note this is for the worst of the waste. There is still low level waste and long lived waste that need not be stored in dry casks. It still doesn't sound as problematic. I think the main issue is finding a site and protecting the casks/waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act#Nucle...

As far as I know, nuclear is the only energy source that pre-pays for waste disposal.

And we are far from just storing that stuff cheaply in a safe and secure storehouse we have moronic ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine where we have to dig out old longterm storage.

What are you comparing it to? Are you factoring in economic costs of continuing to release carbon into the atmosphere?

(I don’t want to excuse lazy/bad accounting... but traditional power plants don’t factor in the cost of the carbon they release, so basically everyone is ignoring long-term costs.)

We are currently looking for a replacement that doesnt externalize costs through environmental damages. I dont think nuclear is an alternative here today from a price point, and looking at the few times pro nuclear people talk about waste management costs, they dont seem to think so either. They mostly tend to give the same answer you did, which isnt an answer. Even if we were to decide today that nuclear would be the lesser evil, we cant do that without a cost overview. We have to at least understand what follow up costs we are leaving the generations after us and look what alternatives we have at that price point. And i dont think many taxpayers understood that Fukushima was an actual liability of more then half a trillion dollars and to how much that adds up to for nuclear all together.

And again, we are in an emergency situation with fossil fuels, and sure, we can talk about how much it would cost in liabilities and actual damages to switch completely to nuclear. It might be worth it for all i know. But if you arent even gonna give me an approximate cost to the taxpayer i will assume you are trying to scam me out of money. Unless we can have an honest discussion on a societal level about the realistic costs on taxpayers its an absolutely horrible idea to build even one more nuclear power plant. While i would love for the German nuclear power plants to run till the end of their planed lifetime to not waste the initial investment into relatively safe reactors, not allowing the building of new ones is the right decision as long as the costs are not transparent. If we should have learned anything from fossil fuel and all the other horrible side effects of technological development, we should at least have learned to make a proper technology (consequences) assessment (Technikfolgenabschätzung) and deliberately act on actual data instead of doing stuff that seems without alternative.

Because they don't need to. Power generation plants of any reasonably modern design don't generate lots of waste, just spent fuel rods that can be reprocessed and a tiny amount of non reusable radioactive material that needs to be stored until it's less radioactive.

All the mess regarding storage sites like Yucca Mountain relates to waste from bomb production, not from power plants.

Even if we had a storage facility like that operating in the US, spent fuel assemblies from power plants wouldn't be permanently interred there, that would be a waste.

The point is that your house or car would be outrageously expensive too if the engineering cost of the design was amortized over very few units.

The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant. This Canadian effort may find a way to build more smaller units, which will be great if they succeed.

Solar and wind are disruptive because the cost to add a marginal unit of generation is near zero. A marginal add of a natural gas power plant in my US state is nearly $100M and several years. Nuclear is probably 10x that.

I understand why nuclear is an appealing technology. Its magical in a way, but it doesn't make sense when engineering a power grid today. It is an awful business with high fixed costs getting disrupted by smaller, cheaper, lower friction alternatives. Again, in my state, New York, despite higher than average rates, nuclear operators like Excelon claim to be losing money operating old plants, and NY ratepayers will be providing $7-10B in subsidy over the next 10-12 years.

This is easily false. When you look at historical nuclear powerplant construction via the NRC, you see a flatline of new reactors starting 1979: Three Mile Island accident year.

In fact, Ford and Carter (a nuclear engineer himself) banned reprocessing of spent nuclear fuels even before that! Due to nonproliferation concerns (NPT had been around since 1970).

The USA kept building nuclear weapons through the 80's, so where were those "subsidies" for civilian powerplants?

The answer is the strong anti-nuclear movement in the 80's society that was the culmination of several different political, disaster, and cultural events. Not because we stopped building nukes in the 80's (we didn't stop).

Edit: One of the defining features of the US's civilian power fleet of reactors is exactly because of its adherence to non-proliferation, independence of military, and economic viability of "standing on its own two legs". Contrast the PWR designs with the power+breeder designs of the RBMK, the Soviet design to accidentally produce power while also producing weapons grade materials. This is why, in contrast, in the USA the reactors at national labs and military sites are so secure and secretive, and why the fuel used in US civilian powerplants are very tame in comparison: only the military is subsidizing it's own reactors for its own weapons grade fuel.

A: US Government enrichment facilities built to support nuclear weapons programs. https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

One could argue that the mines were subsidized by the federal government (so they could enrich and breed nuclear-grade materials), but that is a far cry from GP's claim that "Once the direct subsidy of nuclear via the military's nuclear weapons buildout went away, new plant construction... went way", which is incomparable to the degree of subsidization as the USSR and their dual-use for RBMK reactors (why else design a reactor with a positive void coefficient).

EDIT: I'm not sure whether you're really concerned about the buildout of nuclear powerplants or the evolution of the USA's policy with regards to the nuclear fuel cycle, but I hope I addressed both.

EDIT2: Also: The "big 3" enrichment locations that the military used would also sell to civilian nuclear powerplants. But that's a far cry reason to "subsidize" the construction of nuclear powerplants. This "fuel subsidization" goes on today (MOX fuels) and the American monopoly of uranium enrichment has been broken since 1970 with the formation of Urenco, so the commercial civilian powerplants have always had other places to purchase from (if a regulatory hassle). There's really not a lot of strong evidence that the mining and enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons somehow subsidized the construction of civilian nuclear powerplants.

Can you elaborate here? Solar and wind are relatively cheap, and falling, but a long way from a near zero marginal cost. According to a quick Google, the capital-weighted costs of solar, hydro, wind, geothermal and some newer natural gas plants are similar.

I don't think there was ever a direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power for weapons production. The ways in which military reactors are run to produce fuel for weapons is different than that of power plants. There are dual use technologies involved, shared R&D costs, and so on, but there is no direct subsidy of civilian nuclear power the way you are implying.

> The capital costs of any traditional power plant are massive, and fix high costs of goods sold for the life of the plant.

I'm pretty sure you are in fact missing the point. The costs of building a modern nuclear plant include a huge amount of one-off engineering because we build so few of them. If we swapped the numbers of units built of coal and nuclear power plants, the cost structures would (probably close to) swap as well, which was the original parent of this thread's point.

Look, I'm not here to advocate for nuclear power. I think renewables + batteries are likely to win on economics in the near future, but with some major challenges (building enough batteries for the long tail of intermittent production lapses seems really difficult to me).

But that doesn't argue against the fact that we shot ourselves in the climate change foot by not prioritizing nuclear over coal power for decades, and I think a big part of that is based on a mistake ("nuclear is expensive") is because of this inability to amortize costs over more units.

edit to add: I think your singling out of capital costs is a strawman of the original comment ("Frankly if there was a COTS design pre-certified, then it might be possible to wipe out a huge fraction of the built cost."). It's unclear whether you are including certification and engineering costs in "capital costs", but the intention of the original point was to include those costs.

Most subsidies are not direct and called "subsidy". But as long as nuclear weapons production was a priority, the US had an more of an incentive to research decommissioning, funding final disposing sites, have more people study nuclear engineering, creating job opportunities for nuclear engineers to build up an ecosystem, funding basic research in the area, researching and providing the logistics for transporting waste to disposal sites etc.

https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/pubs/2016/7201-costs-decom-npp....

A lot of this report seems to indicate that estimating future decommissioning costs is hard. The costs are estimates, often created by those with a financial incentive to keep the estimate low. In 50 or so years time the reality of decommissioning might be very difficult.

On the waste aspect: "The cost of managing spent nuclear fuel ... is not always included in the cost of decommissioning, but is often treated separately. This is even more the case for the final disposal of fuel or related waste, which is a major source of costs in waste management, particularly for high-level waste."