Did I say the costs were free? Fuck off I did, the cost of decommission and storage of waste is one of the biggest costs full stop.
But seriously, the issue is overblown, Australia is ideally suited to long term waste storage because we do have large areas that are extremely geologically stable, completely uninhabited, significantly subsurface, and outside the water table in which you could store treated waste outside of the water table at minimum risk. There are multiple independent government reports on the subject.
Now, you can choose not to believe that anyone who is paid can truly be independent, but please go ban auditors if you want to believe that. I welcome your moves to improve ASX disclosure.
If you want to talk about the 'debate' against those reports, I'll laugh, and say well there is a 'debate' about climate change, but in both cases I am happy with the independent reports produced by the Oz government for both.
Moving along.
I'm also assuming we're only talking about the minority of waste that is actually a serious long term hazard, I'm not concerned about the megatonnes of soil that is containment with uranium tailings for example, because thats a non issue that clouds the debate.
Also, the uranium shortage issue is total bullshit. No-one is doing any uranium exploration at all, so we have no idea how big global reserves are. Doubling of current reserves is an extremely conservative estimate, but we'll never know because everyone is off busily finding iron and coal to make more pollution in china. At the current price of uranium, it is just not viable to mine anything but the very richest of sources, and we have huge resources at current levels of consumption.
But that doesn't matter at all anyway, because the cost of fuel is less than 1% of the costs of managing a nuclear reactor. As you rightfully point out, commissioning, decommissioning and labour make up the vast majority of all costs. The price of fuel could increase massively (and way more than the 140 dollar figure quoted, you could easily rich 400 dollars before it had a significant impact. i've seen studies that indicate that a 1000 dollars a ton, it is still cheaper)
Finally the huge concrete monolith shit is bollocks as well, you can (and people have) completely removed nuclear reactors during the decom process for unconditional site release. Admittedly thats only like 15% of total decoms, but hey, if you state that up front you want that, it can certainly be made to happen
Now having established that, yes, I am talking cost per kilowatt our of nuclear engineering including commissioning, decommissioning and storage, yes I am aware of the issues, no your stuff about concrete moniliths doesn't have to be true. Sheesh.
However, the real problem with nuclear power is the extreme difficulty of getting a plant, waste dump or anything through the approvals process to operating, and at any time the government can say 'well no' and you lose all your money. Yucca mountain is a great example of a project that has been completely derailed at vast expense by politics.
The cost of nuclear power would actually decrease significantly if you could count on automatic operating approval based on meeting the plans that were orginally approved - which is by no means certain. Several plants in the US have been built to the plan, then not received operating approval, writing off the entire investment.
Due to this purely commercial risk, nuclear power is currently not viable - and this commercial risk is what will sink everything.
Finally, I don't give a shit about a global solution. I only talked about australia for a reason, other people have to solve the problem, and they will solve it differently. For example, nuclear power is fucking stupid in the cayman islands. I suggest they need a different solution.
For 30 billion dollars, which is less money that we need to spend on a fucking economic stimulus package, we could have 100% carbon free power generation. The altenative is spinning a fucking roulette wheel and hope that the chinese are willing to keep poisoning their countryside for long enough for us to build solar farms sufficent to power australia - which will still cost more.
Because for all the whinging, the demonstrated alternative solution currently proposed is seriously use cheap Chinese made panels with no industrial or environmental controls that are poisoning massive tracts of land with heavy metals.
Nice guys! Go go green power, lets keep oppressing the yellow people. That or play roulette and hope we manage to invest something cheap enough to do it before the world explodes.
Oh and that only works if you can invent a better battery, or ludicrously over provision so you can make hydrogen during the day and burn it at night.
We need to cut carbon emissions by 80%, and we need to start now to achieve that. Of the options that we can implement right now nuclear power is the only option to achieve that goal, despite the compromises, because there is no other demonstrable solution.
You are of course welcome to disagree, and heck, you guys will and we'll never build it, but I'm also totally confident we'll never make the sort of carbon cuts required as a planet. I am looking forward to the massive refugee problems and increased brushfire wars - it'll be therapeutic to have the final solution replace the pacific solution and have more blacks kill each other in Africa.
But anyway, yeah, I know we'll never have nuclear power, and I'm just raging against the small minded tyranny of the flower children, but its a shame to see the green movement poision the planet with their own bloody mindedness.