Nobody knows what nuclear costs, because nobody knows what it will cost to handle the waste 10 years from now, let alone 100 or 1000 years from now. The solution to this for most nuclear operators has been to pay a symbolic fee and let the taxpayers cover the rest "in blanco".
When accidents happen, costs also arrive very suddenly. Nuclear power in Japan is quite expensive already, for example.
Also, since most countries don't reprocess nuclear waste, it's actually good to hold onto it since it's a future source of fissile material.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository
2. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Sure but we don't know how much it will cost. Yucca mountain has been debated for decades already, all those experts, contractors, scientists, politicians have already cost millions. The nuclear industry doesn't pay for that, of course.
> Furthermore, the figures for the costs of nuclear power already include waste disposal
They really don't. They only include a token sum that is nowhere near the actual costs of dealing with the waste. In France they didn't even pay enough to handle actual operations, so the government had to bail them out.
Your source explicitly explains that the cost of a plant is only calculated from the lifetime of the plant, which means it ignores the long tail of costs appearing after the plant has closed.
It also makes the argument that fossil fuel plants should bear part of the cost of global warming (despite transportation actually being a bigger culprit than fossil power plants), yet it doesn't even mention the several hundreds of billions of dollars and counting that the world has paid and is paying only for Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Why does the site not suggest that nuclear operators should pay secondary costs for nuclear, such as Fukushima and Chernobyl, when they do argue that fossil fuel operators should pay the costs for global warming? That seems dishonest.
The source is explicitly the "international organization that represents the global nuclear industry" which does of course explain it. The nuclear industry never mentions costs that are contractually assigned to governments, since such costs never appear in their own books.
But that doesn't mean such costs don't exist.
We have a fairly good idea, Finland built a nuclear waste storage facility deep in bedrock for €818M:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_re...
> The estimated cost of this project is about €818 million, which includes construction, encapsulation, and operating costs.
> Last month, the energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimated the cost to decarbonize the U.S. grid alone would be $4.5 trillion, about half of which would go to installing 900 billion watts, or 900 gigawatts (GW), of batteries and other energy storage technologies. (Today, the world's battery storage capacity is just 5.5 GW.) But as other cities follow the example of Los Angeles, that figure is sure to fall.
The US was able to build nuclear at plants at ~$1B per GW of capacity when nuclear was built at scale during the 60s and 70s [1]. $4.5 Trillion is considerably more expensive even if we assume that serial production would still be 5x more expensive than historical trends.
1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
$6 billion can buy a 6GW "pumped storage" battery in Australia. It's not fantasy it's happening right now.
Furthermore, 1960s reactors were not safe.
Nuclear power can reduce costs by reducing safety and may well do so to compete. At the moment this cost is hidden, as plant owners' liability is capped at a very low level.
Except if you add the cost of 12 hours of batteries to solar it's massively more expensive. You can't just compare an intermittent source and a non-intermittent source, without factoring in the cost of storage.