On 27 Jul 2004 19:42:00 -0700, jim rozen wrote:
In article , Gary Coffman says...
The fuel is however, taxpayer subsidised. It has to come from
somewhere.

Actually, it isn't. The enrichment plants are owned by the government,
but the government doesn't sell the enriched product to the fuel rod
packagers below cost.

This *sounds* good. But what's "cost?" My suspicion is
there's a pretty hefty taxpayer subsidy figured into this
deal. Just a guess.

You shouldn't guess. The current world commodity price for
yellow cake is $11 a pound. It costs $6 a pound to convert
yellow cake to UF6. Enrichment costs $108 a pound (3%
enrichment). Rod fab costs $125 a pound. That's a total
of $250 a pound, All but the actual enrichment is done in
commercial facilities.

The gas diffusion cascades are owned by the government.
The $108 is the operating cost of the cascades (power,
personnel, etc). The cascades were built in the 1940s for
bomb production so plant cost is fully sunk, but if you want,
you can look up that cost and amortize the portion of it
attributable to any given pound of enriched uranium,

(Even using straight line accounting, it comes to less
than 40 cents a pound. That's why no one has bothered
to build more efficient plant, though the technology to do
so is well understood.)

One pound of fuel can produce 17.888 MWhr of electricity in a
Westinghouse plant using the normal burn up schedule. (GE plant
efficiency is similar.) So that's a fuel cost of 1.4 cents per kWhr.
That's about 4 times less than the fuel cost of a coal fired plant,
7 times less than the cost of gas fired plant, and nearly 12 times
cheaper than the cost of oil fired plant at current oil prices.

Gary