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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

> I don't believe them that the cost of decommissioning is built in. Especially since the financiers who pay during construction aim to sell their equity. Also in the UK, recently had to pay 4 billion worth of tax payer funds to decommission. That puts the whole thing at a loss.

Only if you're counting the decommissioning costs for nuclear but not for anything else. By the time a mine is exhausted it's generally a Superfund site, whether they're mining coal or neodymium. And what do you do with fifty million decommissioned solar panels?

> Also, uranium costs are not fixed.

The amount uranium price fluctuations contribute to operating costs is negligible.

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Yes, PV solar is not so good with waste either. Yes, the costs of removing broken solar panels should go into the costs for a project too. But that has nothing to do with judging weather Nuclear plants are a terrible investment.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned. Which is why I think the estimates for decommissioning are wrong. But perhaps there are cheaper ways to do it in the future... I don't know.

Yes, fuel cost isn't that much... apparently 0.52 ¢/kWh. But that could still impact the bottom line if costs were 3x as much. But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned.

Much, if not a lot of this has to do with the simple fact that after you mothball the plany, it's easiest and cheapest to wait a while for various radioactive isotopes to decay to less hazardous stuff. As long as you mothball it properly, and maintain that, there's no hurry.

If the money is set aside ahead of time and invested well then sure. If your dependent on the company that operated the plant to still be around then there just going to keep putting it off until the company fails. At which point the taxpayer is stuck with the costs.

Non-commercial plants have been fully decommissioned, I don't know about commercial ones. (The NASA Plum Brook research reactor is completely gone now).

Seems like I remember the "peak uranium" studies suffered from the same faults as "peak oil". That there is estimated to be quite a bit of easily recoverable uranium left undiscovered. And a near infinite amount recoverable from seawater.

> Yes, fuel cost isn't that much... apparently 0.52 ¢/kWh

That's more than 95% processing, not raw material cost.

> But with 70 years of uranium left, I'm not sure prices will stay at similar prices over the life time of a new reactor.

That's not true at all. The total accessible uranium resources are near inexhaustible. The 70 years you hear bandied about is proven reserves/consumption, which is completely braindead, because proven reserves do not mean what you think they mean.

If the market price of uranium rose by two orders of magnitude, it still wouldn't materially impact the economics of nuclear fuel plants, and it would make thousands of years worth of uranium reserves economically extractable.

Last I read none of the closed plants in the USA had been completely decommissioned.

The Trojan Nuclear Power Plant[1] in Oregon comes "close" to being decommissioned. E.g. the reactor vessel itself was barged up the Columbia River and dumped into a big pit in the ground.

Of course, the spent nuclear fuel remains on site. But that's a political issue, not a technical one.

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

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