nuclear-news

 not only are we leaving our kids and grandkids with a monumental environmental hazard in the form of never-before-seen-on-Earth nuclear waste, we’re also going to stick them with the bill for disposing of it all properly. …..

when you factor in the true costs of nuclear, which include the mining and refining of uranium ore, along with the multi-billions in unbudgeted costs related to the long-term storage of radioactive materials (not to mention transportation costs for those materials to the facility, if it ever gets built), it’s clear that wind is a better deal, as it doesn’t produce any hazardous waste materials. 

How Much Does that Cost? Part I: Nuclear Energy, The Sudbury Star, Ontario,  By Steve May, 2 Oct 11 “……..in my digging, I became increasingly alarmed with what I was finding out about the nuclear industry in general, and specifically with the alarming series of cover-ups and misinformation which the Japanese nuclear industry was providing to their government, to the Japanese people, and by extension, to the rest of the world.

A Long-Term Storage Facility for Canada’s Nuclear Waste
We’ve got a lot of this nuclear waste sitting around at reactor sites, in shorter term storage facilities. After 60 years of generating nuclear power, Canada has yet to come to terms with exactly what we’re going to do with these spent fuel bundles, which will remain radioactive for millions of years (and folks, that’s not an exaggeration, that’s just physics). In response to this problem, the NWMO has begun looking for a permanent home for spent fuel bundles…..

the NWMO has dangled this carrot in front of communities, which is a very real incentive for a potential host: an investment of between $16 billion and $24 billion dollars in order to meet today’s needs. And, of course, jobs jobs jobs. Constructing the facility will take years, and once it’s up and running, skilled technicians will need to be on hand to make sure that it’s running properly. And a small army of security guards will be needed to make sure that nothing bad goes wrong. They’ll be receiving nice paycheques, which they’ll be spending in the host community…..

The Price Tag for Nuclear
So, who’s going to pay for all of that? Ultimately, it’s going to come out of my pockets and your pockets, either through direct funding by our federal and provincial governments, or by the nuclear power companies who will have to hit ratepayers up for the costs. Either way, though, these are unbudgeted expenses right now. No one is setting aside any money to actually build this facility.

NWMO’s site selection process is expected to cost about $9 billion dollars, all just to figure out which site will be best. Some of that money has been budgeted, and we electricity ratepayers are funding it. ….

Of course, I haven’t been paying the real costs for nuclear energy. Nobody has. This long term storage facility question mark which will cost more than $30 billion to identify a site and build a facility, well, no one has been paying for that yet. Those are costs that we and our children will have to pay over time. Never mind that it was my parent’s generation that benefited from cheap nuclear power. They, and my generation today, have only done so because we refused to pay the full price for it.

There’s a term for that, you know. When you don’t pay the true costs for a product or a service, and those costs are passed on to be paid in the future. We call that a “subsidy”. And with regards to what we’ve been doing related to nuclear power, we’ve been subsidizing the production of energy by passing on these real costs to future generations.

So not only are we leaving our kids and grandkids with a monumental environmental hazard in the form of never-before-seen-on-Earth nuclear waste, we’re also going to stick them with the bill for disposing of it all properly. …..

Nuclear Subsidies as Snake Oil
Will nuclear power be a part of our energy future? I don’t think so. We’re starting to understand even now that the costs of producing nuclear energy are simply too staggering to come to terms with. We all want inexpensive energy. That’s why nuclear should have never been considered an option in the first place, but when you don’t do a full cost accounting, you end up being swindled by salespeople.

When you hear that nuclear power can be produced at 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour, but wind power costs upwards of 12 cents per kilowatt hour, it sounds like nuclear is a great deal. However, when you factor in the true costs of nuclear, which include the mining and refining of uranium ore, along with the multi-billions in unbudgeted costs related to the long-term storage of radioactive materials (not to mention transportation costs for those materials to the facility, if it ever gets built), it’s clear that wind is a better deal, as it doesn’t produce any hazardous waste materials.

Even when you factor in manufacturing costs for turbines, that’s nothing in comparison to building a new nuclear reactor. Energy from new nuclear reactors will actually have a baseline costs closer to 20 cents per kilowatt hour, and even that doesn’t take into consideration costs associated with mining/refining and the long-term storage of nuclear waste. Wind just makes a lot more sense from a cost perspective.