Much earlier. The early nuclear industry, which was shared military and civilian, was incredibly nasty. While also covering up issues. Leaving us with enormous clean up bills to this date.
Sellafield's current expected bill is £127B over the next 100 years. Hanford is looking at a cost between $364B and $589.4B.
The imagined economics sold to the public never delivered followed by accidents like Windscale, TMI and Chernobyl.
With climate change the nuclear industry saw the possibility of finally having actual product market fit. So another round of subsidies were created in the 2000s and 2010s. At the same time renewables were seen as the upstart, and storage barely crossed any minds.
The outcome being ruinously expensive plants as seen in Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point c and so on.
What we're seeing now is a token investment to subsidize the necessary industry for military research and reactors. But no one expects it to deliver electricity at a relevant price, or point in time, compared to renewables and storage.
But not anywhere near the nuclear frenzy seen online.
Hanford could be handled for far less (no idea about the UK's sites but probably the same situation). Its the result of making the atomic bombs during WWII. The acids could be neutralized and the uranium separated out. However, a contract that just keeps putting the material in new containers every few years is much more profitable. The idea it should take hundreds of billions to do is pretty much about an nearly infinite time horizon of maintenance instead of just cleaning up the site.
Also, Hanford has nothing to do with civilian NPPs and the processes used there would never be done as part of power generation.
Finally, the cost of NPPs is almost always about the lawsuits. Look at how much Korea and China payed for their NPPs. It was less than 20% of what we pay, they were online in less than 5 years and they are producing 2.8GW for each country for the last decade.
PS The UK has never deployed a standardized design for a NPP. All of their NPPs are different types of experimental designs. Just buy a AP1400 and be done with it for far cheaper.
This revisionist history about military and civilian nuclear being two completely different spheres is getting tiresome.
They were deeply entwined, and still are. The AEC established in 1946 was responsible for both nuclear weaposn and peaceful nuclear technology.
There's been a bunch of civilian dual purpose reactors ran at hanford.
Yes. Much of the waste is from the weapons program. But saying that the site has nothing to do with civilian nuclear plants is just you making stuff up.
It is sad when the premier example touted is South Korea. The country where 68 people received prison sentences totaling 253 years and 9 months from the corruption scandal involving falsified safety certificates, fraudulent components and bribery.
China is also especially funny. Despite the nuke bros perfect environment of stable regulations, cheap workforce, state financing, authoritarian rule and so on nuclear remains insignificant. Sitting at 4% of the grid mix and shrinking. While renewables and storage are absolutely exploding in scale.