National Academies Report on Hidden Costs of Energy Production

The National Research Council has a new report that tries to estimate the cost in dollars of energy production and consumption in the U.S. Mostly their focus is on hydrocarbons, air pollution, and global warming, but they do spend some time looking at nuclear energy, mostly in the chapter called Energy for Electricity. Here’s a paragraph from their summary:

The life-cycle damages of wind power, which produces just over 1 percent of U.S. electricity but has large growth potential, are small compared with those from coal and natural gas. So are the damages associated with normal operation of the nation's 104 nuclear reactors, which provide almost 20 percent of the country’s electricity. But the life cycle of nuclear power does pose some risks; if uranium mining activities contaminate ground or surface water, for example, people could potentially be exposed to radon or other radionuclides; this risk is borne mostly by other nations, the report says, because the U.S. mines only 5 percent of the world’s uranium. The potential risks from a proposed long-term facility for storing high-level radioactive waste need further evaluation before they can be quantified. Life-cycle CO2 emissions from nuclear, wind, biomass, and solar power appear to be negligible when compared with fossil fuels. [italics mine]

That’s seems fair. One would like to know, for instance, if, when, and where we’re going to bury the nasties before we go estimating the immediate cost, much less the “hidden” one. I was struck by the implied assumption that there would be a long-term facility and that’s all they would need to worry about. What are the risks and hidden costs of storing the waste indefinitely on-site? Of reprocessing, if we want to consider it more? Of transporting the waste to the long-term storage? This topic could use its own report.