France doesn't have an answer for decommissioning costs.
The example of isar is particularly interesting - isar 2 is one of the latest that started decommissioning but is in much more advanced state vs others. Each operator does it as they wish. If you wait a bit more, rad levels drop so it's easier to decommission with less specialized equipment
https://www.edf.fr/en/the-edf-group/producing-a-climate-frie...
But at least the cost is factored in from the start. Those costs often double during construction but at least we know the decommissioning costs are factored into the fake numbers they use to get approval to start builds.
UK Eighth Allocation Round are from 20 July to 7 August 2026, Offshore wind £113 /MWh, Onshore wind (>5 MW) £92/MWh
UK Government also awarded a CfD to Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, set at £92.50/MWh for a 35 year period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contracts_for_Difference_(UK_e...
In fact this nuclear plant was the first use of CfD.
It's a great scheme because it (in theory) prevents cost blowouts being added to energy prices. Good incentives to get things built quickly and cheaply.
The actual price for Hinclkey is roughly a third higher than the CfD and that extra cost should be borne by the French taxpayers via EDF.
In reality they shifted some costs onto the next nuclear plant instead, working around the CfD and foisting the excess costs back onto the British tax/billpayer.
Obviously they refused to use CfD for the next UK nuclear plant because unlike wind power, they have no faith in it being completed anywhere near on budget. And if they bid the real cost it wouldn't get built in the first place.
So now UK taxpayers are paying in advance for a decade to get new nuclear built with no cap on cost.
Technically I think the Hinkley prices are what we'd call £2012 [if we could easily write a subscript here I would use that for 2012] that is, they are prices in the Pound Sterling as it was at some fixed point in the year 2012 and so when paid in the CfD contract they'd be adjusted for inflation.
All the early CfD prices were in £2012, whereas those newer CfDs have strike prices in £2024 which is about 40% more money in real terms. You can see this notation in the linked Wiki page.
So, if we adjust all the prices to £2024 that price for Hinkley is about £130 per MWh whereas Solar farms are £75, onshore Wind is £92, off-shore Wind is £113
Except, that's not really what's going on either because those AR8 prices are what's called "Administrative Strike Prices". AR8 like all the other allocation rounds is a reverse auction whose results we won't know for months, and those are the start prices in the auction, if you want to win and you're not the only bidder you will need to come lower. Maybe your competitor says they can do solar for £72, but you stared at your loan sheet and projected sunlight over the next decade and dared to say £71.50, you win that contract. But the strike price is now £71.50 not £75 per MWh. Your competitor might still build their solar farm, but at market prices not the guaranteed £71.50 per MWh you've contracted for. Maybe they get lucky - this summer the CfD "subsidy" for Solar farms paid us back many millions of pounds, because electricity prices were high and the subsidy is effectively a fixed price. Of course this doesn't cancel the hundreds of millions we spend subsidising Drax, but that's a completely different discussion.
Edited to add: Just like a conventional auction there may be no bidders at the start price. Unlike some low stakes auctions you might have seen in person or on TV they don't offer again with a better price, the auction just fails. This happened for offshore wind in AR5 a few years back, the government wanted to pay no more than £44 per MWh in £2012 for offshore wind energy -- cheaper than solar, so the firms who build wind farms looked at their costs and said "No thanks" and there were zero bids that round, and a subsequent government increased the ASP for AR6 wind and got bids at much more realistic prices.
(I think fusion is great, by the way, but I just don’t believe any timelines at this point anymore)
That is not correct.
You might want to look that up, because I’m older than the oldest operating reactor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno_of_Elea
i like how he died. guts.
and yet they aspire to run or work in startups. ... hee hee.
All the data showing that it is still free. There is no cost, generally anthropogenic climate change is increasing the habitability of our atmosphere.
The reactor vessel and the primary coolant loop.
All that steel can be vitrified and stored in stainless casks somewhere fairly indefinitely.
Or just buried. It doesn’t stay reactive very long.
The rest of the site is no different to any other electricity generator, and no different really to the average industrial manufacturing plant.
Everyone likes to just say ”decommissioning costs”, without actually thinking about what any of that means.
It’s not like every nuclear power site is a Chernobyl.
But of course there are no norms for max radioactivity levels at a coal power plant site.
But if decommissioned properly, most of the ash inside the building can be collected and mixed into soil and bricks at a safe concentration not far above background radiation level.
In a nuclear power plant, there is no release of radioactive materials, but it’s possible for parts of the structure to absorb radiation and become radioactive itself, and that’s much harder to deal with.
Steel is taken apart and measured, non-activated steel can be melted down and recycled. Activated steel has to go into storage, either low level nuclear or medium level nuclear waste.
The biggest concern for steel is cobalt. During manufacturing steel with very low cobalt content is usually used for nuclear applications, but there is still small amount of cobalt.
In reactor, under neutron radiation, stable cobalt-59 changes to cobalt-60, strong gamma ray emitter with a half-life of 5 years. So neutron activated steel has to storage for at least few decades.
When done not properly, this is a health hazard.
" Circa 1983, construction was finished of 1700 apartments in Taiwan which were built with steel contaminated with cobalt-60. About 10,000 people occupied these buildings during a 9–20 year period. On average, these people unknowingly received a radiation dose of 0.4 Sv. Some studies have found that this large group did not suffer a higher incidence of cancer mortality, as the linear no-threshold model would predict, but suffered a lower cancer mortality than the general Taiwan public. These observations support the radiation hormesis model, however other studies have found health impacts that confound the results. "
" The four low-level waste facilities in the U.S. are Barnwell, South Carolina; Richland, Washington; Clive, Utah; and as of June 2013, Andrews County, Texas. "
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernkraftwerk_Greifswald (you have to translate that page yourself, the English version doesn't contain the relevant information)
Just a suggestion, but alternatively you could also accept that in reality, decomissioning actually is expensive.
One state in Australia, Victoria, recently disappeared $15 billion of public funds to criminal organisations under the guise of funding a big infrastructure project.
Okay, that’s not entirely accurate. No one knows how much money disappeared, it could be up to $30 billion.
Labor-Green governments do this everywhere.
It’s entirely reasonable to suspect something similar is going on in Germany around their nuclear decommissioning.
I suppose your name ("rightnutwingjob") gives it away but "Did you know crooks exist" isn't actually a proof that grand conspiracies are true.
Encapsulating the waste and burying it somewhere on an abyssal plain in the deep ocean should also be a pretty low-risk approach, the IAEA has looked into variations of that.
Like someone else said, I think it's all expensive because some people want it to be.