Mindis:

"The cost of disposal of spent fuel is included in the cost of fuel in calculating the levelized cost of nuclear power."

I don't see where that is indicated in the brief that you link to.

Jul 19, 2012 -- 4:12PM, wohali wrote:

Nuclear energy does produce waste that is incredibly toxic and stays so for a very long time.

Are waste issues factored into those cost per megawatt figures?

No, they are not. Many things are left out of that dishonest figure. The cost of decommissioning for one. The cost of dealing with the highly toxic waste such plants produce. They don't include that figure since they haven't done anything with that waste yet. They just store it in pools of water at the plant site. The toxic wastes come not only from the plant itself but in the production of the fuel.

So, no, nuclear is neither green nor cheap.

Jul 19, 2012 -- 9:12PM, wohali wrote:

Mindis:

"The cost of disposal of spent fuel is included in the cost of fuel in calculating the levelized cost of nuclear power."

I don't see where that is indicated in the brief that you link to.

Unfortunately that document doesn’t say what factors are included in the component inputs. The federal government oversees disposal of spent nuclear fuel from all nuclear power plants; funding comes from a quarterly tax or surcharge paid by the plant into the DOE’s Nuclear Waste Fund (www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/10222) . This surcharge is a significant amount, and cannot be overlooked in calculating the cost of nuclear power production. As with the costs of waste from other fuel sources, the cost of spent nuclear fuel disposal is included in all levelized cost models. The model used by the California Energy Commission was taken from Energy Information Administration, which explains:

Nuclear fuel prices are calculated through an offline analysis which determines the delivered price to generators in mills per kilowatthour. To produce reactor grade uranium, the uranium (U308) must first be mined, and then sent through a conversion process to prepare for enrichment. The enrichment process takes the fuel to a given purity of U-235, typically 3-5 percent for commercial reactors in the United States. Finally, the fabrication process prepares the enriched uranium for use in a specific type of reactor core. The price of each of the processes is determined, and the prices are summed to get the final price of the delivered fuel. The one mill per kilowatthour charge that is assessed on nuclear generation to go to the DOE’s Nuclear Waste Fund is also included in the final nuclear price. The analysis uses forecasts from Energy Resources International for the underlying uranium prices.

www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/assumptions/pd...(2011).pdf

Of course, the federal government has apparently been riding the nuclear waste around on the back of trucks for the past few decades, and plans to dump it somewhere sometime.