Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “Areva, the French nuclear plant operator, offers that 70% of the cost of a kWh of nuclear electricity is accounted for by the fixed costs from the construction process.” Yes, this exactly means that operating costs are very cheap: if 70% of the cost per kWh is amortization of construction costs, and only 30% is operating costs, and the kWh from nuclear plants are still the cheapest, or exactly means that the opera…
> Which ones? What were their operating costs? “Each nuclear power plant employs 500 to 1,000 workers. Nuclear worker salaries are 20 percent higher on average than those of other electricity generation sources.” 40 mill x 50 years = 2 Billion dollars just for wages. https://www.nei.org/advantages/jobs As giant complex mechanical systems over time moving components like pumps and turbines need to be replaced. Due to…
Yes, if you multiply things by 50, you get large numbers. Note, however, that $40M per year for a plant generating 2200 MW day in day out (well, let's say 90% of the time) results in $40M / (2200 MW * 0.9 * 1 year) = $0.002 per kWh, that is, 1/5th of 1 cent per kWh in employees cost. I say that's really cheap.
> As giant complex mechanical systems over time moving components like pumps and turbines need to be replaced.
Same is true for all kinds of power plants. You need to compare the costs between all for a sensible comparison. It's fun to make all these calculations by yourself, but fortunately, there's already a metric for that, called levelised cost of electricity (LCOE). It's basically the total lifetime cost of a facility (construction, operation and decomissioning) divided by total amount of energy produced. As you can see in [1], LCOE of nuclear easily beats solar, and matches wind plants, which suffer from the disadvantage of only producing electricity when the wind blows. If you didn't have option of base load fossil or nuclear plants, you'd have to build storage for wind and solar, which would make their LCOE jump through the roof.
Look, it's clear that nuclear isn't free, so yeah, you really need to spend a billion on fuel and another on wages over 50 years. More importantly, though, over those 50 years you'll produce $50 billion worth of electricity. Just look at the published LCOEs, and consider how much they'd have to go up for solar & wind if we couldn't fall back on fossils and nuclear.
In future, if we ever manage to get off fossil fuels, the way we do it will be nuclear for base load along with some amount of wind and solar (though not much, due to environmental concerns that will make it very hard to build significant amounts of wind and solar). As I hope is clear for you, it most definitely will not be wind & solar + batteries, and no nuclear.
[1] - https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf