Per the article, old nuclear plants are being closed because they are not cost-competitive with natural gas. If you're saying they're actually being closed due to public opposition, you should cite a source. Preferably one as non-partisan as the NYT.
You are correct, they are being closed due to financial reasons, not due to public outcry.
However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind.
Right now we subsidize two technologies, rather than taxing the externality. It would be far more economically rational to tax carbon emissions, and for coal to also tax the other costs it imposes in non-carbon emissions.
There's currently a legal battle going on to allow nuclear plants to have Zero Emmisions Credits (ZEC) in several states where nuclear plants can no longer compete in the marketplace:
> However, there is an argument that they should get the economic benefit of being carbon free, something that is granted to solar and wind.
They already have the benefit of not having to pay for their long term waste disposal and being bailed out in the event of a critical failure, which is arguably among the biggest long-term costs for nuclear.
Not too long ago German energy companies paid a flat fee of 24 billion Euros to absolve them from any future responsibility to pay for end storage. The US nuclear industry does pay a tax for disposal but that doesn't cover anywhere near the actual costs of storage.
We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now.
Isn't that a nice vision of the future? We might manage to get our cheap, clean and renewable energy, but we will still be stuck taking care of very dangerous and expensive waste for thousands of years.
>...We are talking about materials that need to be stored thousands of years here, a couple of dozens billion Euros (or Dollars) are peanuts in that regard. The timescales are just insane with this stuff and make it very likely that we still gonna have to pay for keeping disposal intact many thousand years after we phased out of nuclear into something we can't even fathom right now.
Soon it will be possible to use most of the waste as fuel:
"...Fast reactors can "burn" long lasting nuclear transuranic waste (TRU) waste components (actinides: reactor-grade plutonium and minor actinides), turning liabilities into assets. Another major waste component, fission products (FP), would stabilize at a lower level of radioactivity than the original natural uranium ore it was attained from in two to four centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years"
The worry people have about nuclear waste is greatly overblown to say the least. The amounts generated are manageable and in a relatively short amount of time we can use most of this "waste" to generate electricity. To put it into perspective, no one of the general public has ever been hurt by nuclear waste and you definitely can't say that about coal waste.
