I have talked about the costs of nuclear waste disposal in a lot of my blog posts. The people promoting nuclear power don't seem to be factoring all the costs of waste disposal into their rosy picture of nuclear economics. Recently economist Mark Cooper of the Vermont Law School addressed some of these issues. He says that if the full costs of nuclear power were publicized, the interest in nuclear power as an answer to our future energy needs might be significantly diminished. Cooper expressed his opinions in a filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that was part of the court-ordered Draft Waste Confidence Generic Environmental Impact Statement process.
Cooper asks a question about whether the real total cost of nuclear waste storage at reactors sites and eventual disposal in a permanent geological repository were large enough to merit more consideration by the NRC in nuclear power plant licensing decisions. He goes on to argue that his estimated cost of up to three hundred and fifty billion dollars is certainly big enough to require inclusion in licensing deliberations. He says that although some of these costs have been taken on by the government and are not being born by the nuclear industry, that does not mean that they are not real and can be discounted in any discussion of the costs of nuclear power. He also says that the costs of waste storage and disposal will be subject to the same runaway cost increases that are seen when estimating the cost of construction of new reactors.
Cooper estimates that the additional waste storage and disposal costs that are not currently being included in the cost of electricity generated by nuclear power could amount to as much ten to twenty dollars per megawatt hour. This translates to around one to two cents per kilowatt hour. Based on the cost estimates of the Energy Information Administration for new electricity generated by nuclear power, inclusion of hidden waste costs could add as much as ten to twenty percent to the cost of new nuclear power generation.
With respect to existing reactors, factoring in the extra cost of waste storage and disposal could make them uneconomical to operate. Recently several existing reactors in the U.S. have been shut down because the existing operating margin of nine dollars per megawatt hour in not sufficient for the operators to make a profit. The NRC has a regulation that states that if an operator cannot demonstrate the ability to make a profit with their reactor(s), they will have their license(s) revoked. Inclusion of hidden waste costs could result in many old reactors having their licenses pulled. If a reactor is shut down, the cost of storing the waste onsite can be up to five times the cost of storing the same amount of waste at an operating reactor.
What Cooper is saying about the hidden costs of nuclear waste handling is sufficient to call for a reevaluation for nuclear power generation as a viable source of electricity in the future. However, he did not factor in the cost of recovery from a major nuclear accident or the cost of decommissioning old reactors. Had these additional costs been included in his filling, the argument against expanding nuclear power generation would have been even more compelling.
