Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinordi
There's so many incredible subsidies to the nuclear industry that aren't accounted for in the levelized price. First just look at the billions of dollars that went into AECL, which the government then sold for $130 million. Worst investment ever. Second, if nuclear operators are so competitive why can't they buy insurance? No insurance company in the world will insure a nuclear facility. So those costs are socialized to the taxpayer. Nuclear operators also usually get sweetened land and water rentals to build the economic case. And the final disposal is not the utility's problem. THe final disposal is also one of the most costly steps of using nuclear power. No matter which way you slice it, nuclear is incredibly expensive once you really start looking at all the implicit subsidies they receive.
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Wouldn't some of that willingness to subsidize the program you're referring to (AECL) come from the notion that it probably gave Canada other political benefits that (like them or not) were part of the equation that justified such expense? Also, what cost data are you referring to? I would really like to see the levelized cost data you're talking about. The stuff I've seen puts the cost of nuclear around $0.12/kWh and makes it quite competitive in the "alternative" space. I'm actually sitting in on a seminar that will discuss the costs of modular nuclear designs this week that should be pretty informative.
Besides, you're referring to a technology that is fundamentally different from the reactors I am talking about. The molten salt reactors operate at atmospheric pressures and will most likely use a Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle as opposed to the Uranium-Plutonium fuel cycle. The interesting thing about the Thorium-Uranium fuel cycle is that it can actually recycle the actinide wastes that are the nasty part of the nuclear waste stream (i.e. burn existing waste up) - and after a few hundred years the thorium cycle based waste can be less toxic than uranium ore that typically gets used to create low enriched uranium for a light water reactor that uses the Uranium-Plutonium cycle to produce an equivalent amount of power.
My point on this is that the waste production and handling challenges of a thorium based cycle will be different and likley less severe in manitude and duration than what we currently deal with.
At our level of science, there is no energy source that is truly perfect, but I think the trade offs related with the LFTR design are worth pursuing in a big way.
