The vast majority of that cleanup is incredibly QALY inefficient, spending millions removing tiny bits of radiation from soil that would cause a hundredth of a cancer case. This is because the rules are that they need to return the area to the same radiation levels it used to have, not merely to a safe enough level that further action would be QALY inefficient.
Even in 2012 the natural reduction in radiation meant you have only a few square kilometers[1] with exposure levels over 20uSv/h, the level at which we can actually detect a cancer increase. An area that seems to have had less than a thousand people judging by satellite photos. There is no way to justify spending $150 billion cleaning up something that would kill only a couple of people (particularly when you can just pay them the old value of the land/housing and then let them decide whether they want to accept the increased cancer risk) when even in Japan you can save a thousand lives with that money.
Or, even if you assume no disasters, how many QALYs can you buy with the cost difference between a renewables based grid and a nuclear based grid.
Enough that no one is building one of the latter (not France, not China, not South Korea), and everyone is building one of the former (including France, China and South Korea)
1) "below nuclear" is a very flexible concept (the Levy plant in Florida cost $1 billion and they didn't even break ground) and people often confidently assume a nuclear price that is three times smaller than actual building costs.
2)"purely renewable" is a small phrase about a big assumption. 80% solar/wind is cheaper than operating what the US has right now; solving the last 20% has a number of options and we don't know which will work, but while we are quadrupling our current level of solar and wind we have some time to work on that. (Noon Energy makes some attractive claims but it's very early days.)
3) A small amount of "clean firm power" - almost anything's cheaper than nuclear- saves a large amount of storage. Maybe that's closed loop geothermal, maybe that's synthetic natural gas, maybe it's nuclear, but nuclear is REALLY expensive.
Even the ridiculous latest plants with 5x cost overruns costing £35 billion seem to have a lifetime electricity cost of around €0.05/kWh. That doesn't seem "really expensive" to me.
Old 70s style nuclear power is under €0.01/kWh.
I also think your 80% is optimistic and it'll start to become much harder to integrate in once we go over 50% total yearly electricity production. Going to need large natural gas plants just lying around idle for most of the year.
A commonly repeated (was going to say 'believed' but I'm not sure that's actually true) misconception.
Why there is a large contingent of people who think nuclear doesn't need storage is a genuine mystery to me. There's been more storage built for nuclear than for any other power source.
I am unaware of any nuclear electricity storage needs. Wasting extra electricity is trivial, while last I calculated you'd triple electricity costs due to storage if you switched the UK to wind power.
So what number did you get for nuclear when you did these calculations? With no storage you've got to be talking something like 20x for nuclear, right?
> The most important use for pumped storage has traditionally been to balance baseload powerplants, but may also be used to abate the fluctuating output of intermittent energy sources.
For switching entirely to current gen French nuclear (rather than the MUCH cheaper 1970s plants) it was something like a 30% increase in consumer electricity costs.
Basically, you can just have make your "baseload" the amount you want at peak time and sell the excess electricity for basically nothing to industry. This is obviously a bad idea and you'll want some storage instead, but it's much less than what you need to last through a calm but cloudy week.
I very much encourage you to look up numbers for various storage types and energy sources and make a few models. It takes a few hours but its pretty interesting (I should really take it from my hard drive at home and put it on a blog somewhere...).
