What are some arguements I can say to defend the cost of Nuclear fission?

Question

Information says the cost of nuclear fission is high, I need some help on what i can say that can goes against it because i am for nuclear fission in a class debate

Answer 1

Nuclear power, cost to the environment aside, is the cheapest form of electrical energy production in every major country except the USA.  It is marginally more expensive there than coal.  

Look at the $/MW section of this chart and load factor and size per plant.

for OECD countries

         LOAD FACTOR,    LIFE,    BUILD TIME,    $/MWh,  Size

COAL    85%                     40+yr   5 yr                 25-50  300-60  

GAS      85%                      20-30   2-3                35-60  200-80

NUKE   85%                      40+yr   5-10               20-30 1000+

wind     17-45%                  20        1-3                35-60   3-60

solar      9-24                     20-40      1-2              >150    <1

Answer 2

theres enough for the whole world to use it for power and last for tens of thounsands of years. If it was used as widely as coal or oil then it would be almost as cost effective.

Answer 3

It produces way less air pollution and CO2 emissions than coal. Also, other than catastrophic events like Chernobyl, when monitored correctly, it causes way less deaths per year than coal mining.  It also uses less land and produces less water pollution.

Answer 4

Why don't you look up nuclear power on wikipedia?

The cost of nuclear fuel processing has already been paid.  We have CENTURIES worth of nuclear fuel just laying around.  More than 300 tons of plutonium (originally intended for nuclear weapons) lays in stockpiles.  This is an IMMENSE quantity of fuel.

Answer 5

This is almost a back-handed compliment.

We still have supplies of unmined fissionable fuel, and we can still get more out of the ground, concentrate it, and we can find a way, some time, to get rid of its garbage.

But we are  actually going to need to take a lot of military weapons out of use (storage) to convert most of America's coal burning to fission.

Well, we could wait 30 to 40 years and extract it from the earth, but to do it in a decade we would need a lot of stored material. If you consider that a plus, then it is a great argument.

Now very recently Canada has attempted to get a nuclear facility going to produce medical isotopes. We have had a problem... the claimed perfect design demonstrated an uncontrollable increase in energy, so much so that it resembled a Chernobyl in development.

Oh yes, fail safe worked.  Remember that the Chernobyl disaster came because they attempted to test the fail safe, and it did not work.

We can, at some cost, build fail safe fission plants that will not fail for a hundred years. But we would prefer to build them at 1/4 the cost and have no failure for 50 years. We can then replace the plant after 45 years using only the money saved.

Answer 6

If effluent costs (pigovian taxes on carbon) are included, nuclear costs less.  Nuclear also encourages a higher level of technical expertise in its workers (ignore Homer Simpson) which may carry over into other industries.