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Comment by 08-15 | Hacker News Reader

> Transferring nuclear waste and processing them is not cheap.

Actually, it is, because there is so little of it.

However, in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the US government declared that only the US government can handle nuclear waster, and nuclear power plant operators have to pay into a fund so that the waste handling will be funded. It then spent the following 38 years doing a grand total of exactly nothing, forcing the power plant operators to store the waste. And not for lack of funds, because the Nuclear Waste Fund sits an an unspent $45 billion.

Please stop pretending nuclear waste was either a financial or a technical problem. It's purely a political problem.

> a law that puts upper cap to damages

Which US law places a cap on damages caused by nuclear power plants?

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> ... unspent $45 billion

Which has, of course, long since been spent. When anything is done, we will be taxed for it. $12B was handed over to contractors for work done on Yucca Mountain.

Wikipedia:

> "US court of appeals ruled that nuclear utilities may stop paying into the nuclear waste ... The fee ended May 16, 2014."

> "Lacking an operating repository, the federal government initially paid utility companies somewhere between $300 and $500 million per year in compensation for failing to comply with the contract it signed to take the spent nuclear fuel by 1998. For the ten years after 2015 it is estimated to cost taxpayers $24 billion in payments from the Judgment Fund. The Judgment Fund is not subject to budget rules..."

So, $47b was collected from ratepayers for extra-high-cost power, and sent to the govt. Now, taxpayers are paying out $2.4 billion, every year, directly to nuke operators, who pocket it. ($2.4b would buy a pretty big solar farm.)

When something is determined to do about the waste, there will be no nuke ratepayers left, at several times the cost of renewables -- or operators, except those kept open to collect their $2.4b. Instead, taxpayers will pick up the bill. Again.

> Which has, of course, long since been spent.

Of course. But not on anything related to nuclear waste. In plain language, it has been stolen by the government.

If you don't like the taxpayer having to pick up the tab left by incompetent politicians, you should have voted differently.

"Stolen"? Government subsidized the nuke plants for much more than $47b. The $47b was extracted from ratepayers, but is not being returned to them. If anyone is stealing, it is the nuke plant owners.

Now you're making up stuff because you lost the argument about the cost of waste disposal.

I see that you have not been paying attention.

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