The external costs of fuel, as I never tire of pointing out, is given in figure 9, which is pretty straight foreward:
http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdfNo nuclear advocate has ever said that nuclear energy is
free. What nuclear advocates say is that the costs of nuclear energy are
lower than
any other form of energy that is scalable on a ten to one hundred exajoule scale
and is climate change gas free.
It is cheaper than all of the make believe forms of energy that have not gottent to an exajoule because they are either too expensive (solar) or too unreliable (wind).
It is remarkable that after almost 30 years of cheering beginning with the
idiotic paper of the anti-nuclear hydrogen hypercar salesman Amory Lovins (
Foreign Affairs, 1976) that the really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really cool forms of energy have never produced an exajoule individually in a 470 exajoule world.
If you don't know what you're talking about, google. If you do know what your talking about, expect to hear criticism from
lazy people who don't know what they're talking about.
The anti-nuclear future has arrived. It's here. There are consequences of dangerous fantasies and the planet is choking to death, now not some day.
The Romanian Cernovoda CANDU unit one reactor has the lowest operating on the planet, about 1.25 eurocents/kw-hr. The US Catawba reactor set a record for operating costs of 1.8 cents/kw-hr.
Both reactors produce more energy than the entire world out put of solar energy, and both have done so without a single loss of life and in the space of a few small buildings.
If you are free to dump your wastes without cost, like the coal industry, coal can roughly approximate the costs of nuclear, but if nuclear safety requirements were required for coal, the coal industry would collapse in a day, rather like a Utah mine.
The Scherrer Institute has produced many papers on combined external and internal costs (their research source was not google) and have produced results like these:
http://e-collection.ethbib.ethz.ch/ecol-pool/journal/psi_energie_spiegel_e/9_2003.pdfTough shit.
It's too bad that the anti-nuclear industry was able to pull the wool over the eyes of the world in the 1970's and 1980's because the bill has come due,
now.