Economics of Nuclear Reactor

You should watch this video (and several others) of this professor, David Ruzic from Uni of Illinois This video he talks about the economics of nuclear plant. [VIDEO] This video, he talks about modular micro-nuclear reactor [LINK] His videos are great. Worth your time.

For anyone interested in the economics of fission reactors, Illinois Energy Prof did a GREAT video a while back: [VIDEO]

> is it going to be the catalyst that will enable humanity to accelerate wreaking havoc on what's left of our ecosystems? The question is how cheap can it get, can the energy production scale up vs cost, and how much does maintenance cost. This is a good video about fission energy production economics [VIDEO] If one of these fusion reactor projects results in a competitively priced power plant, ok, we can reduce fossil fuel energy production towards zero in a few decades. That's pretty good for the environment but nothing really "new" is possible. If one of these fusion reactor projects results in a 10x reduction in the cost of electricity... then we have something new. Things that people didn't imagine being possible before become possible. Things like desalination instead of taking water from rivers or aquifers because it's cheaper. Tearing down dams because the power isn't needed. "Farms" in skyscrapers packed with artificial light where food can be produced without pesticides or herbicides because it's a controlled environment. Using landfills like mines, extracting tiny amounts of useful materials so ordinary mining becomes much less needed. You can also think of plenty of things cheap plentiful energy could make happen that are destructive too... it is difficult to project and I assume will go in both directions.

That turns out not to be true. Here a short primer on the economics of nuclear reactors: [VIDEO] Intermittent renewables on the other hand require massive subsidies.

The economics of nuclear are good but not as good as you're implying. It takes a long time and a lot of money to start earning on a nuclear plant. Given the risks involved it's not that easy to build one. [VIDEO] I don't think firing nuclear waste into space would be wise either. The risk of that blowing up on launch is high and the fall out from that would be a disaster.

Here's a video where an energy professor goes through the finances of gas vs nuclear power (very slowly) - [VIDEO] In short, it takes a very long time for a nuclear power plant to become profitable. Investors would rather pick something like gas that starts being profitable earlier, so they have the profits available to reinvest into other enterprises. I think this, rather than public perception, is why we don't do nuclear power (after all, our society does plenty of other things despite similar levels of outcry).

Waste disposal or reprocessing are neglectible if you keep in mind that a single nuclear reactor produces electricity worth over one million US Dollars per day. See: [VIDEO]

In the short term nuclear energy is expensive, but in the long term nuclear energy is one the cheapest sources of energy available. Source - [VIDEO] (this is even more true when you consider the cost of externalities)