Secondly, the EDF is debt-laden and heavily subsidized by the French state, this is why other providers cannot compete. Nuclear energy itself is on the expensive end when it comes to energy sources. As the article points out, France has not even allocated a third of the money it needs to decommission existing plants.
[1]https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Nuclear do get most money for research and development compared to other energy sources, but I have a hard time see how that translate to energy prices. R&D usually goes to universities.
If we use France specifically, according to the report here (https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/progress_on_ene...):
"In France, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Ireland and Finland, the highest shares were spent on fossil fuels (although in absolute terms, the fossil fuel subsidies in France were slightly lower than in Germany).
Both Germany and France is at the same time dwarfed by the amount of subsidies given to fossil fuel in the US. Nuclear subsidized is a tiny dot on map compared to the billions being spent on coal, oil and gas.
Nuclear power is extraordinarily capital intensive but fairly reasonably priced to run once it's built.
This also creates a strong incentive to run plants beyond their operating lifetime, which France may do. That takes us into exciting new territory safety-wise.
Done with a car? Scrap it, strip it, recycle the recyclables, and toss the rest. Done with a building? Implode it and cart it away. Same goes for almost all other pieces of machinery and capital.
Done with a nuke? Now you have another cost almost as high as building it to begin with! It's like having to buy your car and then spend almost the same amount to un-buy it at the end of its life span.
Yes such things can be priced in, but it requires a tremendous amount of foresight and discipline. There is a constant temptation to cut corners on any cost that won't be incurred for a long time, especially if that time is beyond the term of a politician or the career of a corporate bureaucrat.
Done with a solar panel? Send it to a bulk electronics recycler. Done with a wind turbine? Scrap it like any other piece of heavy machinery.
There are other industries with non-trivial decommissioning costs, like chemicals, oil and gas, etc., but at least the time frame is reasonably short. Nuclear decommissioning costs drag on and on, theoretically many times longer than the plant's useful life span.
* Professor David Ruzic
* Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering
* Department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering
* University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
They were lying before the first commercial plant was built ("too cheap to meter") and have continued well past the industry's deserved end ("incredibly cheap", above). The article demonstrates that even operating them, neglecting all of construction and decommissioning, costs more than alternatives.
"Incredibly" is a perhaps unintentionally revealing admission.
