Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

Now, I've studied (with very little interest, to be sincere, but still...) economics at University, and one thing I remember quite well is the difference between the marginal cost of something and it's average cost (I'm not talking about externalities here, I'm referring to the real costs for who builds the nuclear plant and sells the energy)

The marginal cost is defined (for example by Wikipedia) as "the change in total cost that arises when the quantity produced (or purchased) changes by one unit". Nuclear plants have a quite low marginal cost (in this case it's the cost of the additional kilowatt produced) since once the plant is built it can produce huge amounts of energy and fuel (uranium) is currently quite cheap if compared to other fuels (oil and gas, mainly)
Reading this document from the Energy Information Administration we discover that:

Production costs for nuclear power, operation and maintenance plus fuel costs, are also low, averaging 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. This cost roughly matches coal and is significantly below the costs of operating a natural gas plant.

So everything is nice, right?

Hold a sec, Homer! We forgot to talk about the average cost!
This is the cost per kilowatt produced including all the costs we had, have and will have to pay, from building the plant to paying the interests on the capital we borrowed to cleaning up the wastes we produce to decommissioning closed nuclear sites. And this is a LOT of (taxpayers, usually) money.

How big is this lot of money, thou, is hard to tell: the quite funny thing about this issue, in fact, is that there isn't yet consensus, between experts and regulators, over the methodology that should be used in predicting the total cost of building, maintaining and cleaning up a nuclear plant.

So we won't even try to predict things, and we'll stick to past facts.

Now have a read at this article published a couple of days ago, and judge for yourself:

The cost of cleaning up Britain's nuclear sites has soared by more than £10bn, the Sunday Telegraph has learned.

A draft strategy document published last November by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the government authority created last year, put the costs associated with decommissioning and clean-up, including operational costs, at £56bn. Since then, however, the total costs have risen to around £70bn - it could be the highest clean-up bill in British history.