Here is the entire volume of high-level, long-lived waste that France needs to store over the long term for 80 years of nuclear power (with 70%+ nuclear power in its electricity mix).

The question of nuclear waste, hammered home by the anti-nuclear crowd, has long since been answered. And the answer is: it’s far from being a problem.

As for the cost of storage and decommissioning, it makes no sense if we do not give a financial order of magnitude.

At French current electricity price, a 915MW reactor will produce 1.1 billion euros of electricity over one year. A 1500MW reactor will produce 1.8 billion euros of electricity over one year.

When you sell 60 billions of euros worth of electricity per year for 60 years, even if you pay 50 billions for storage and 2 billions to decommission an entire plant, it’s quite profitable.

Except those reactors are off 30-50% of the time due to shoddy construction

For French nuclear power, the lowest load factor ever recorded is 54% in 2022. The cause is the number of maintenance operations postponed because of COVID, plus a corrosion problem detected on several reactors of the same generation, which have since been repaired.

• This is an extremely unlikely combination of circumstances, on the one hand
• On the other hand, it wouldn’t have had any consequences if we’d had more redundancy, and hadn’t suddenly stopped building reactors for 25 years.
• Despite this, nuclear power still has a load factor 2x higher than French wind or solar power.

The rest of the time, the load factor of French nuclear power hovers around 70-75%, and that’s not due to bad design, it’s a strategy. I’ll let you read this link to learn more.

€1.5/W in 2023 money is pure fiction

Of course it does. But the fact is that french nuclear power has paid for itself dozens of times over. It’s factual, it’s historical.

and overnight costs with free capital aren’t real costs once you adjust for inflation and stop cherry picking the first reactors before negative learning rates kicked in.

Go argue with the Cour des Comptes, not me

Chernobyl and Fukushima. These two events, which between them account for a few thousand deaths at most (compared with the tens of thousands of deaths caused by coal in Europe alone, for example), triggered a panic fear of nuclear power.

For decades, the nuclear industry has been abandoned and sabotaged, with projects such as Phénix, Superphénix and Astrid in France, and virtually all new reactor projects, cancelled due to anti-nuclear opposition.

Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.

We can also thank the Germans for sabotaging the EPR. We started the project together, they forced us to add a lot of totally unjustified redundancies and safety features that made the prototype very complex and therefore costly to build, and then they slammed the door on us.

France was able to output 2 reactors per year at 1,5 billion of euros per 1000MW for more than 2 decades during the 70’s to 90’s. The whole French nuclear industry has cost around 130-150 billions between 1960 and 2010, including researches, build and maintenance of France’s whole nuclear fleet.

A 1000MW reactor, at current French electricity price and for a 80% capacity factor, generates 1,4 billion of euros worth of electricity per year, for a minimum of 60 years.

Nuclear is not costly, and can absolutely compete by itself, if you don’t sabotage it and plan it right.

we had almost no facemasks and much better results

You’re comparing apples to oranges, and you’re throwing every other possible explanation out the window because it does not fit your point.

Norway, Finland and Denmark, whose demographic, geographical and cultural situations are much more comparable, recorded far fewer Covid deaths per capita than Sweden.