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It's the capital costs of the plants that's so daunting to investers in this type of energy; the costs of the protracted legal battles that must be fought to successfully site, build and license each plant. Once a nuke is up and running, it puts out power at a lower rate than any other source of energy. This of course doesn't include the formidable costs of decomissioning a plant nor of waste disposal.
Reprocessing was abandoned by Carter because of the fear of nuclear proliferation and because it wasn't economic. Perhaps if nuclear fuel does become in short supply, it will begin to become economic. However, there's very good reason to believe that when the high grade uranium ore is depleted in several decades, there will be plenty of not-so-high grade ore available. (See Kenneth Deffeyes' new book Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak. He describes his own investigations into this matter.)
I read some years ago that the nuclear industry believed it was due for a comeback in this country: as natural gas increases in price, our baseline capacity will have to come from coal or nuclear. Their judgement was that renewables for baseline generation were not going to be available in any amount that matters. They judged that the country would face a choice between coal and nuclear. They expect that coal will be unacceptable because of global warming. Now it appears that their expectations are bearing fruit politically. (However, a rapid expansion of coal capacity is underway; new coal plants that promise to be cleaner and to allow resequestration of CO2 are being built. We get twice as much power from coal as in 1975; nuclear power is still 20% of our capacity in spite of no new plant construction in 20 years because they're getting good at keeping nukes on line.)
Please correct these impressions of mine. I'm not an expert in these matters like your foil NNadir.
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