[jartelt]

Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built. That is why nuclear plants in Illinois and New York have been bailed out recently and why utilities in other starts are looking for similar bailouts. These utilities could not profitably operate existing nuclear plants in the current market. I totally agree that nuclear power has a much better safety record than most would believe and that nuclear power is a great low carbon electricity source, but it is not a cheap power source. Maybe modular reactors can compete sometime in the future, but we really have no idea until some are built and operated.

[thephyber]

> Actually it is NOT cheap to operate a nuclear power plant after it is built

I would argue that the innovations in rival energy sources have made it comparatively expensive, but the cost was largely established when the plant was built (likely in the 1960s - 1970s). In other words, it was cheap, but the fact that nuclear requires such a massive outlay to build the facility means that nuclear is a very long term financial gamble and assumes that a variety of other energy sources don't fundamentally change their cost curve (like oil and natural gas did in recent decades).

[freeflight]

It's only "cheap" as long as you can outsource the long-term costs, like for waste storage or in the case of a disaster.

As is, these plants are barely profitable, imagine they'd be forced to set funds aside for clean-up operations in case something goes really wrong, talking about real funds here that would make an actual difference and not some token amount. They don't do that because they know it would totally ruin their bottom line but by any metric they should be doing exactly that because it would be their mess that needs to be cleaned up when something goes wrong.

These costs are very real and in the case of catastrophic failure can be so high that even major economies are struggling to pay them (like Japan has been).

And it's not like we have any good ways to hold anybody responsible when something actually goes wrong. The responsible company can just declare bankruptcy and have somebody else deal with the costs and long-term ramifications of the clean-up efforts aka the tax payer.

[pinpeliponni]

Most of nuclear waste should not called that. The more radioactive something is the more energy production capability it still has. Only a lunatic puts that stuff in caskets and digs caves for storage, and doesn't reap that. If the spent fuel was re-used correctly, we could run all the humanity's toys with it for several hundred thousand years without breaking any sweat.

... And that brings us to those costs. There are parties that benefit from causing the costs to ramp up. So they have tried to find out ways to do exactly that, and prevent the good cost reducing innovations from reaching even testing so they could be mass adopted some day.

It is widely known that we have knowledge of vastly safer reactor types, but we haven't been able to even get permits for full scale test runs. We know that there are several things about the fuel cycle we could improve, but we have to stove the best stuff away. We could actually go and fix some of the old installations, and their design features, but we are not allowed to do that either. Probably we could drop the price of nuclear power to a fraction (say, 1/10th?), but it is not politically correct to talk about that publicly. And so on, and so on.

Many people simply want nuclear power to fail.

[freeflight]

> If the spent fuel was re-used correctly, we could run all the humanity's toys with it for several hundred thousand years without breaking any sweat.

And here we go, the fabled magical Thorium reactors.

There are many reasons why we don't do this, one of them are engineering constraints because molten salt is very corrosive as such maintaining a reactor like that is a real pita.

You should also be aware that, contrary to popular belief, even Thorium reactors can be used to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, it's not impossible to weaponize U-233, after all this process was used to produce the fuel for Operation Teapot in 1955.

And lastly: The only reason why thorium reactors have such a great "safety track record" is that we barely build any of them, our sample size is way too small to make any useful statements about this.

We have roughly 435 commercial nuclear plants in operation, with another 63 being built [0]. There have been around 20 major nuclear accidents over the years [1]. In contrast to that, there are only around 15 Thorium reactors [2], imho that's not a big enough sample size to make any statements about the actual failure rates, especially when you consider that none of these 15 reactors are run on a commercial basis.

For all purpose and effect, Thorium reactors are just an attempt to "rebrand nuclear" to get rid of the horrible nuclear track record and public reputation. Even if we'd go full Thorium we'd still need some reactors to cycle uranium for the Thorium reactors to actually work. In that regard, it's not really a solution but just another excuse for keeping the problem going.

[0] http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle#List_of_tho...

[misterhtmlcss]

Actually no, he's not talking about Thorium reactors, he's talking about Breeder Reactors I believe, which will allow the fuel to be recycled over and over until it's virtually exhausted of all it's radioactivity.

I think that's what he is talking about. I studied this 30 years ago in primary school, so I might be off, but that's what I remember.

It's actually quite cool what other reactors are capable of and the amount of fuel we waste with existing commercialized types of which were designed to produce weapons grade plutonium as a by product, so efficiency wasn't valued over the byproduct of plutonium.

Anyway I think nuclear is interesting.

[nudiustertian]

thorium and breeders generally go together

[opo]

I don't know the situations in Illinois or New York, but the fuel costs are obviously very low for nuclear power. PG&E says in regards to the Diablo Canyon power plant:

>...At 2.78 cents per kilowatt-hour, DCPP’s average production costs are lower than all other forms of electricity, but are higher than the national average of 2.19 cents per kilowatt-hour for nuclear power

https://www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/shared/edusafety/syst...

France gets a majority of their power through nuclear power and has lower rates for electricity than its neighbors:

>...France enjoys one of the lowest electricity prices in Europe; at 14.72 euro cents per kWh, the average cost of electricity in France is 26.5% cheaper than the EU average (20.02 euro cents per kWh).

https://en.selectra.info/energy-france/guides/electricity-co...

[dv_dt]

I would apply some scepticism of some of those numbers until the plant gets seriously into the end-of-lifecycle decommissioning. Particularly when one looks at how the San Onofre cleanup cost is being estimated and who is paying. (4.4B.. which doesn't seem like it was set aside from the rates being paid during the lifetime of the plant...)