I agree with you generally about nuclear power. Part of the problem [the dangers aside] is that many of the costs are hidden. In a KWH analysis often excluded are such additional costs for the plants e.g. the liability insurance, the cost to dispose of the fuel, and generally the enormous costs to build the plants to begin with - often heavily subsidized [comparatively to other types of electrical production] by the government.
That's a misleading statement at best. Nuclear plants, at least in the US, are required to collect a fund (usually through a surcharge on customers) to pay for decommissioning. As for waste, the plants pay for short term storage. Long term storage was supposed to be taken by the federal government and buried in Nevada. Since that hasn't happened, the fed's instead pay the plants for long term on-site storage.
On-site long term storage is in the form of what's called a dry cask, a train car sized, explosion-proof, concrete drum with several tons of wasted stored inside. Such casks do not need cooling and because they're essentially giant chunks of concrete will last for centuries in their current condition, which is generally in a secured lot sitting in the sun just outside of the containment building. Yep. Just sitting in the sun. It doesn't need any more than that.
Time may prove ideas like coring out mountains and shipping waste to such places as not only unnecessary, but far riskier than leaving it in casks.
Either way, despite popular perception, nuclear waste, unlike every other source of pollution on the planet, is already fully managed. There are no externalities, no victims being slowly poisoned by gases. No unknowns, the entire cost of the operation is known. It is far ahead of carbon emitting fossil fuels.
As for capital expenditures, if you're going to build a 2 gigawatt plant, it's going to cost billions of dollars no matter what type of energy it's going to run on. In fact, that's
the main reason why renewables haven't had a wider adoption: deploying them on an industrial scale is enormously expensive, because they have the exact same problem as nukes. They're a huge capital expense, with a low operating costs and a 20 year payback period. Right now, a solar power plant with an output equal to a nuclear reactor will cost far more than the reactor, even with fuel and waste costs included. Wind power costs slightly more to install than a reactor. On top of that, the renewable sources take up a lot more land than a nuclear plant.
Having said that, we really need to fund both and use natural gas to fill the short-to-mid-term shortfall. No energy source is perfect, pretending that you should go with one instead of the other is a false dilemma. You have to make a cost-benefit analysis everytime you need to build another power plant, and based on that decide which source to use it.
Germany is a net exporter of electric power, and the nuclear power plants are hardly ever producing their maximum output. On days with lots of wind/sun, there aren't even needed today. So, this shouldn't be much of a problem, despite what the lobbyists say.
Uranium ore is getting expensive. At one time it was dirt cheap, but the price of it has increased tenfold over the past decade, spiking in 2007. It has dropped a little recently due to the Fukushima incident. When you consider that a nuclear plant has to operate for 25 years to pay for itself, you need the price of the fuel to be relatively stable, otherwise it'll bankrupt you.
A whole lot of bad facts here. First, uranium prices plummeted when the rest of the commodity bubble popped in 2008. Second, even if uranium climbs back to the previous, unsustainable levels, it really doesn't matter much. Fuel costs are a fraction of the cost of running a nuclear power plant. A 10-fold increase in fuel costs will only increase the cost of operations by ~20%. Compare that with coal, where a 10-fold increase in fuel will increase costs by roughly 800%.
The reason why is simple: you just don't need that much fuel to operate a reactor. It's a couple hundred tons, replaced every other year or so. A coal plant will burn through hundreds of tons a day. Hell, they only pull 40,000 tons of uranium out of the ground in a whole year, which is roughly what a large coal plant will burn in a single hot summer. If it ever does get too expensive? Just build a plant to process thorium, which is even more plentiful than the already fairly abundant uranium. Existing reactors don't need much in the way of alterations to use thorium.
Sidenote on thorium: despite some articles some of you may have read, thorium isn't inherently safer or cleaner than uranium. Think of them as largely interchangeable.
