Most of the cost of nuke plants these days is cost of delays. Most of those delays are caused by Malthusian greenies (too many people) and NIMBYs. However, I expect those forces (an affordable luxury when things are going well) to be significantly trimmed if the grid starts getting flaky (under 99% availability).TheRadicalModerate wrote:Does anybody know what's going on with the modular pebble-bed R&D? What are the engineering snags that are preventing this from being deployed? PBMR seems like a pretty straighforward way to take the cost of a nuke plant down by at least a factor of 10.
McCain calls for building 45 new nuclear reactors
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.