> We can roughly break the costs of operating any power plant into three categories: fuel costs, operation and maintenance costs, and capital costs
The article forgets to mention another cost: The cost of disposing/storing used up fuel. This is often forgotten, but a major cost too, if the spent fuel is to be stored safely and securely. And it needs to be stored like that for hundreds of thousands of years!
Switzerland is currently in the process of building a national waste storing facility, a quick Google search showed that the US currently does not have one.
It's only a major cost due to the need to manage media headlines, NIMBYism and an uninformed public. You actually could just dump it into the ocean to join the billion tons of Uranium already there...
Your comment comes of as a bit dismissive, but I'm trying to take your word here.
A quick google search shows that the there have been policies [0] to prevent ocean dumping of nuclear waste due to adverse effects on the environment. It doesn't seem like something we should do.
Also it seems like you are implying that spent fuel and raw, unenriched uranium are somehow the same, which is also not true.
> A quick google search shows that the there have been policies [0] to prevent ocean dumping of nuclear waste due to adverse effects on the environment.
Check the citations. The wikipedia article is conflating general oceanic waste dumping with nuclear waste dumping. Things like oil float(!), come in huge quantities and react both physically (coating) and chemically with wildlife. As best I can tell dumping solid dense nuclear waste onto the abyssal plane has no known or theoretical environmental effects.
> Also it seems like you are implying that spent fuel and raw, unenriched uranium are somehow the same, which is also not true.
You're correct here. However the moderating effects of water mean that if you did glass solid nuclear waste and dump it in the abyss you'd get no detectable increase in ocean radioactivity.
People also seem to forget that the power plants have to be removed after their lifecycle. The safe decommission of a nuclear power plant takes decades and costs billions again.
The article forgets to mention another cost: The cost of disposing/storing used up fuel. This is often forgotten, but a major cost too, if the spent fuel is to be stored safely and securely. And it needs to be stored like that for hundreds of thousands of years!
Switzerland is currently in the process of building a national waste storing facility, a quick Google search showed that the US currently does not have one.