But its not cheap, given that nuclear waste disposal will take for so long and companies do not factor the true price of securing nuclear waste for thousands of years. We could see what happened in Germany after the nuclear exit was put into place: Energy companies tried to split up, moving their nuclear business into one company, and their renewables into another - a very apparent move to let the nuclear company (with all the burdens of waste disposal management) go bankrupt into a couple of decades, knowing that the government will take over the burden for free. The german government prevented this through a buy-out deal, where the companies would put a sum of roughly 50bn € into a fund, and the responsibility ownership would go over to the government once and for all.
The issue is, no one can put a real price tag on nuclear waste management that will take thousands of year. It's all some made up number that is used to show that nuclear energy is cheap. But it is not, we are just boworring money from the future. Even if you think from an engineering standpoint that we can secure nuclear waste for generations to come, I don't believe we have the economic system to achive that. Companies don't exist long enough to be responsible for thousand-year long commitments - only society does.
We don't need to store nuclear waste for thousands of years. We need to store it until we have fast reactors that can use it for fuel. After that, we'll need to store the fast reactor waste for 300 years.
Since the decline is exponential, most of the radioactivity will be gone from that waste after the first few decades. Melt it into glass blocks and bury it, and it'll likely be fine.
Several fast reactors are in commercial operation already, and various companies are working on new designs.
We've had fast reactors since the 70s. It is simply that they are even less economical than regular nuclear power plants, and those are already completely uncompetitive compared to renewables.
> Breeder reactors are costly to build and operate. About $100 billion (in 2007 dollars) has been spent worldwide on breeder reactor research and development and on demonstration breeder reactor projects. Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is economically competitive with a conventional light water reactor. The capital costs per kilowatt of generating capacity of demonstration liquid sodium-cooled fast reactors have typically been more than twice those of water cooled reactors of comparable capacity. Although it could be expected that once in production this cost ratio would decline, today few, if any, experts argue that breeder reactor capital costs could be less than 25 percent higher than that of similarly sized water cooled reactors.4
> The breeder reactor dream is not dead, but it has receded far into the future. In the 1970s, breeder advocates were predicting that the world would have thousands of breeder reactors operating this decade. Today, they are predicting commercialization by approximately 2050. In the meantime, the world has to deal with the hundreds of tons of separated weapons-usable plutonium that are the legacy of the breeder dream and more being separated each year by Britain, France, India, Japan, and Russia.
> We need to store it until we have fast reactors that can use it for fuel
Which obligates us and generations after us, to keep using nuclear and develop those in the first place. So, please factor in those costs today into the price.
We have no idea what those costs will be. Given that for-profit companies are trying to develop new fast reactors, at least some people think it will actually be profitable.
However, I guess it's reasonable to include some such estimated cost in today's reactor prices, if we also:
1) Include the costs of climate change and/or ambient carbon removal in the cost of all fossil fuels, and
2) In wind/solar costs, include the cost of all the batteries, long-distance transmission, demand management, and overproduction that we'd need to keep the grid reliable without the fossil backup we're using today. Areas with sufficient hydro can skip this.
The issue is, no one can put a real price tag on nuclear waste management that will take thousands of year. It's all some made up number that is used to show that nuclear energy is cheap. But it is not, we are just boworring money from the future. Even if you think from an engineering standpoint that we can secure nuclear waste for generations to come, I don't believe we have the economic system to achive that. Companies don't exist long enough to be responsible for thousand-year long commitments - only society does.