You haven't presented anything close to enough evidence to claim "rate payers or tax payers will make up the difference between what is set aside and what it really costs."
I suspect that what you think you read was that each plant has $100-$130 million set aside and that it will actually cost $500 million - and therefore there is a shortage.
What you're missing is that the requirement is not a specific amount of cash. It's to demonstrate on an ongoing basis that the current funds (plus expected additions/earnings through the retirement process) exceed current projected costs for whichever decommissioning option they're planning on.
The recently retired San Onofre plant in California, for instance, has over four billion dollars in their decommissioning fund.
You're missing the fact that a couple dozen reactors have been retired in the US. Feel free to provide examples of the ones that had to have taxpayer bailouts. "A billion here... a billion there" sure sounds like lots of money, but over the course of decades of electricity production, it isn't a large impact on the price of running a plant.
The point about the fact that we only produce a small amount of uranium domestically is the same as relying on foreign oil.
Except that it isn't at all like relying on foreign oil. Back before fracking cut into our net imports of crude, the strategic petroleum reserve held enough oil to cover at best a couple months' supply. In the case of nuclear power, we have years of fuel on hand. That's more than enough time to ramp up production or switch to recycling spent fuel (even in the ridiculous scenario that Canada and Australia decide that they won't sell it to us any more).
It's a required commodity that is subject to wild swings in the market and rate payers will always be the ones that pay the price.
Again - your math is badly off. Fuel costs are a tiny proportion of the cost of nuclear power. Even if they were to climb tenfold, the impact would be small. This is in no sense like oil/gas/coal. Steel/concrete costs could impact capital expenditures for construction of new plants... but the impact of such commodity price changes would be far larger for wind power.
How many tons of fuel rods does a typical nuke plant go through in a year
IIRC, it's about 100 tons per GW per year. But that's roughly a million average households. If you call that two and a half million people, that's a tad over an ounce of fuel per person per year.
So imagine that uranium costs skyrocket by 10-fold. That would make them about $400/pound (which is pretty unlikely given how common the stuff is). Instead of your annual fuel costs for a 100% nuclear home being $2.50/year/person... that "wild swing" means that it now costs you $25/year/person. Hardly anything like the impact of gas/coal prices fluctuating.
Put another way... one pound of uranium produces more electricity than 15,000 tons of coal. And (were costs and spent fuel storage really a big concern), the vast majority of that pound could be recycled and used again. The coal has become a massive pile of coal ash... and almost 50,000 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
of course we all know that there's no solution for the disposition of spent fuel rods other than just store them on site
What you supposedly "know" in this case is simply not true. Spent fuel storage issues are political... not technical. We choose not to recycle spent fuel... but we could. We choose to fight over Yucca... but that's because some in Nevada don't want it - not because it wouldn't work.
which is why Fuckusall is such a disaster
5+ years later and we still have people who think that the spent fuel storage at Fukushima contributed significantly to the release of radiation? That's pretty surprising.
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