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by Manuel_D 905 days ago
"shifting construction costs to ratepayers" is done for pretty much all energy projects. This is like saying gasoline refineries shift their costs to people buying gas at the pump.

Waste management is a total red herring. The total amount of waste the US nuclear power industry has produced fits in a volume the footprint of a football fields and 10 yards high [1]. Nuclear power plants have to pay the cost of their nuclear waste disposal up front, it's already internalized into their costs. We already have nuclear waste facilities dug into bedrock, their actual use is being held up by political posturing.

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

1 comments

I'd originally replied without really knowing anything about the topic, just noticed that you were avoiding responding to a specific point. Now that you're using dishonest framing like volume rather than mentioning cost. I looked up the cost, nuclear waste costs massively eclipse all other energy subsidies, the OP was right, and I think you know this based on your failure to respond honestly twice.
> I looked up the cost, nuclear waste costs massively eclipse all other energy subsidies

It's be really good if you shared how you arrived at this conclusion. Because renewables have received $11 billion in subsidies in 2016 alone [1]. By comparison, nuclear waste management is already factored into the up-front costs of nuclear power plants [2]. Deep dig nuclear waste repositories like Onkalo cost less than a billion euros to store decades worth of nuclear waste [3].

I'm very, very interested how you reached the conclusion that the cost of storing nuclear waste "massively eclipse" all other energy subsidies. You are very likely mistaking the cost of managing waste from nuclear weapons production [4], which is distinct from nuclear power generation.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies_in_the_United...

2. https://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedfiles/org/info/pdf/eco...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

4. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106081#:~:text=Fast%20Fa....