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keepamovin parent
The cost you cite sounds more like the cost of the earthquake and tsunami, rather than the Daiichi reactor meltdown cost.

Even if it were, in the time limit safety increases, such costs decrease, more so with more development.

More broadly, nuclear looks expensive not because it's unproductive — but because standard asset pricing discounts its most valuable feature: time. Dense, stable power for centuries gives a low net present value due to long-duration-use and high up front cost, but this more a flaw in how future value is discounted in common economic models that punish rather than reward long life.


throw310822
No no, that's the cost of the nuclear plant disaster cleanup. Current estimate about $200 billion, some estimate it much higher. Consider that there are still 300 square kms of territory designated as "difficult to return". That's the size of a big city- Paris or Milan. The cost of a disaster depends on the area that is rendered uninhabitable- imagine Paris, London or New York being declared off-limits for a century, the cost would be astronomical.

I'm not against nuclear energy in principle, it just seems to be a technology that instead of becoming cheaper becomes more expensive, has enormous costs beyond energy production (decommissioning, waste management) and is subject to extremely rare failures that threaten to evaporate any gain in the previous decades or centuries. I don't even think it's that dangerous for people- victims of Chernobyl and Fukushima have been a tiny number. It just seems economically not worth it.

sokoloff
That’s “just” a matter of the choice of discount rate, which needs to account for both inflation and uncertainty effects. (I’m pro-nuclear energy, but think the costs are indeed high and uncertainty is medium or high.)

If you’re arguing the chosen discount rate is too high in some models, we can have a productive discussion about that.

If you’re arguing the methodology is wrong, you’ll need to explain more before I understand your point of view, or perhaps you’ll be interested in lending me $1M today and I’ll pay you $100/day for the next 55 years, by which time you’ll have more than doubled your money.

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