[acidburnNSA]

Are we all aware that nuclear power plants pay for waste disposal as part of their electricity sales cost in a trust fund called the Nuclear Waste Fund that has a balance around $50B in the US at the moment?

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.

[cf498]

I am not familiar with the US system. The problem in Germany is they pay a lot less then what it actually costs to "dispose" of the waste, since we dont have a method to dispose it. Hence the subsidizing, allowing it to buy out of the waste they created and which will likely have running costs for a very long time. The same could be witnessed on a larger scale when it came to the decommissioning of nuclear power plants in Germany due to the exit from nuclear energy. It was immediately clear that the to be collected funds would not suffice.

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.