Comment by Reason077
3 hours ago
> "It’s really not, nuclear inherently requires extreme costs to operate."
Not just to operate, but to clean up and decommission at their end of life. In the UK, for example, early reactors were built cheaply without much consideration/provision for eventual decommissioning. This has left an enormous burden on future taxpayers, estimated to exceed £260 billion, much of it related to the handling and cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste [1].
Thankfully new reactors are being financed with eventual decommissioning costs "priced in", but this is another reason why they've become so expensive.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nucle...
> cleanup of vast quantities of nuclear waste
The total high level, dangerous nuclear waste of the entire world since we started playing with nuclear power 70 years ago fits in an American football stadium with plenty of room to spare. "Vast quantities" is a serious exaggeration.
The UK alone had the following inventory of nuclear waste as of 2022:
~1,470 m³ "high level" waste totalling ~14,000,000 TBq at year 2100. "High level" waste is that which generates enough heat to require specially designed and managed storage facilitates to prevent spontaneous fires etc.
~496,000 m³ intermediate level waste totalling ~1,000,000 TBq at 2100
~1,340,000 m³ low level waste totalling ~130 TBq at 2100
~2,750,000 m³ very low level waste totalling ~12 TBq at 2100. VLLW is considered safe enough to be disposed at landfill sites subject to certain special considerations. But not until the radioactivity drops below a certain threshold, of course - it still has to be stored at special facilities for many decades until then.
It's a pretty vast and costly problem even if you don't consider this a "vast quantity".
Source for these figures: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-radioactive-wa...