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The Flawed Economics of Nuclear Power  http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update78.htm

Lester R. Brown

Over the last few years the nuclear industry has used concerns about climate change to argue for a nuclear revival.  Although industry representatives may have convinced some political leaders that this is a good idea, there is little evidence of private capital investing in nuclear plants in competitive electricity markets. The reason is simple: nuclear power is uneconomical.

To get a sense of the costs of nuclear waste disposal, we need not look beyond the United States, which leads the world with 101,000 megawatts of nuclear-generating capacity (compared with 63,000 megawatts in second-ranked France). The United States proposes to store the radioactive waste from its 104 nuclear power reactors in the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, roughly 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Nevada. The cost of this repository, originally estimated at $58 billion in 2001, climbed to $96 billion by 2008. This comes to a staggering $923 million per reactor—almost $1 billion each—assuming no further repository cost increases.

The following information is from The Rocky Mountain Institute website.

The Nuclear Illusion  27 May 2008, DRAFT subject to further peer review/editing

That’s all false. In fact, nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete—so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn’t debate whether it’s clean and safe; it weakens electric reliability and national security; and it worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options.

Yet the more decisively nuclear power is humbled by swifter and cheaper rivals, the more zealously its advocates claim it has no serious competitors. The web of old fictions1 ingeniously spun by a coordinated and intensive global campaign is spread by a credulous press and boosted by the nuclear enthusiasts who, probably for the first time ever, now happen to lead nearly all major governments at once. Many people have been misled, including four well-known individuals with long environmental histories2—amplified by the industry’s echo box into a sham but widely believed claim of broad green endorsement—and some key legislators. As a result, the U.S. Congress in late 2007 voted $18.5 billion, and the industry will soon be back for another $30+ billion, in new loan guarantees for up to 80% of the cost of new U.S. nuclear units. And the long-pronuclear British government, abruptly reversing its well-reasoned 2002 policy, has decided to replace its old nuclear plants with new ones, although, it claims, without public subsidy3—a feat no country has yet achieved. Thus policy diverges ever farther from market realities.

At the end of 2007,4 the world had 439 operating nuclear stations totaling 372 GW (billion watts) of net generating capacity with an average age of 23 years—a year older than the 117 reactors already shut down. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says 31 nuclear units were under construction in 13 countries—eight more than at the end of 2004, but ~20 fewer than in the late 1990s. All but five were in Asia or Eastern Europe; yet the Asian Development Bank has never financed one, and reaffirmed this policy in 2000, nor has the World Bank, with a minor 1959 exception. Much of the reported activity is not new: of the 31 units listed as under construction, 12 have been so for at least 20 years, some were started in the 1970s, and two longmoribund projects have been re-listed.5

Turning ambitions into actual investments, firm orders, and operating plants faces fundamental obstacles that are now first and foremost economic, since the political obstacles related to safety, waste, proliferation, etc., can be and in many countries have been bypassed by fiat. The economic evidence below confirms that new nuclear power plants6 are unfinanceable in the private capital market because of their excessive costs and financial risks and the high uncertainty of both.7 During the nuclear revival now allegedly underway, no new nuclear project on earth has been financed by private risk capital,8 chosen by an open decision process, nor bid into the world’s innumerable power markets and auctions.9 No old nuclear plant has been resold at a value consistent with a market case for building a new one. And two strong global trends— greater transparency in governmental and energy decision-making, and wider use of competitive power markets—are further dimming nuclear prospects.