I cut my teeth has a young lawyer opposing the building of a nuclear power plant at Allens Creek in South Texas. The case was not about safety--although that was a concern for my clients--but about the high cost of building a nuclear facility. The costs become part of a utility's rate base are of course passed on to consumers through rate increases. Nuclear power is being touted as a clean alternative fuel to replace coal. That sales-talk is misleading on two counts. Nuclear power generates the most toxic wastes of any fuel cycle, and despite higher energy costs for fossil fuels, nuclear power is the most expensive. In a recent analysis, “The Nuclear Illusion,” Amory B. Lovins and Imran Sheikh put the cost of electricity from a new nuclear power plant at 14¢ per kilowatt hour and that from a wind farm at 7¢ per kilowatt hour. No new nuclear plants are under construction in the U.S. Two years ago, building a 1,500-megawatt nuclear plant was estimated to cost $2–4 billion. As of late 2008, that figure had climbed past $7 billion, reflecting the scarcity of essential engineering and construction skills needed for a project as complex as a nuclear power plant. The United States, which leads the world in on-line nuclear capacity, intends to store the wastes from 104 plants at Yucca Mountain in 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, assuming no further 
repository cost increases. Other significant costs often underestimated by a utility proposing nuclear power (also the case at Allens Creek) are decommissioning costs. Recent estimates show decommissioning costs can reach $1.8 billion per reactor. Nuclear fuel costs have risen even more rapidly. At the beginning of this decade uranium cost roughly $10 per pound. Today it costs more than $60 per pound. The higher uranium price reflects the need to move to deeper mines, which increases the energy needed to extract ore, and shift to lower-grade ore. Uneconomic capital costs are reflected in the declining number of plants being built worldwide--only 36 nuclear power are under construction, 31 in Asia and Eastern Europe. Proponents such as GE said in the go-go days of the 1950s that nuclear power would be "to cheap to meter"--not anymore.[Left] implosion of the Trojan nuclear power plant cooling tower, May 21, 2006. The plant operated for only 10 years of its projected 50 year life cycle. It was closed by PGE for being uneconomic.
[Right]Members of the "Crabshell Alliance" returning from a protest outside the plant in 1978.
For a full report visit: http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2008/Update78.htm