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by ben_w
817 days ago
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The industry was for decades vilified and obstructed, but not ignored, because of the nature of the failure modes. Mean cost vs. worst-case cost. The mean cost of cleaning up nuclear reactors is tiny. Eyeballing this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy I think we've had around 100 PWh total generated by nuclear reactors over history? There was only one Chernobyl ($340 billion inflation-adjusted), only one Three Mile Island ($2 billion adjusted), and only one Fukushima (probably around $200 billion adjusted). If so, those accidents cost $542bn/100 PWh = 0.5¢/kWh, which is a trivial excess on even cheap (5¢/kWh) electricity: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%24542bn%2F100+PWh+in+u... Unfortunately, two of those three demonstrate how expensive these can be when they go wrong, and that number is sufficient to just bankrupt quite a lot of countries — for example, Ukraine, which is where the Chernobyl reactor is, has a nominal GDP less than the cost of the Chernobyl cleanup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... |
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