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Maybe it's expensive because it's regulated to death. > Plus, the spent fuel has no place to go, it stays on site in concrete casks, potentially forever. Gre
by andbberger 6y ago
Maybe it's expensive because it's regulated to death.
> Plus, the spent fuel has no place to go, it stays on site in concrete casks, potentially forever.
Great! Seriously, there are zero problems with that.
'In fact, the U.S. has produced roughly 83,000 metrics tons of used fuel since the 1950s—and all of it could fit on a single football field at a depth of less than 10 yards.' [0]
[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Maybe it's expensive because it's regulated to death If by “regulated to death”, you mean, “heavily subsidized and granted special liability regimes to reduce individual operator risk exposure”, that would be true.
- cbmuser 6y agoA single nuclear reactor produces electricity worth 1 million dollars per day. Nuclear power plants are money printing machines, not money pits.
- hyperbovine 6y agoSo... 20 years to payoff assuming zero maintenance costs, downtime, or competing technical innovations. Sign me up.
- strawberrypuree 6y ago20 years, or even 50 years, in the context of critical infrastructure and state level debt obligations is not that long. Nor is it sensible to consider “competing technical innovations” as if, say, solar and nuclear were mutually exclusive technologies. California can and should build both, now, and not wait for some other technology or price point to come and save us. You can’t breath money.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Nuclear power plants are money printing machines, not money pits. This is a point on which nuclear advocates and the nuclear industry disagree. I wonder which understands the economics of the situation better?