Jophiel wrote:
Shit, even in this thread, you have a couple of guys from the nuclear energy game agreeing that the immediate barrier to nuclear energy is that gas-fired turbines are just plain cheaper.
Cheaper only when the total cost of nuclear is calculated, which includes massively inflated costs involved with actually getting a nuclear plant up and running, pretty much all of which have to do with 40+ years of environmentalist fear mongering about nuclear power. Put the two side by side in terms of cost in materials to generate X amount of electricity and nuclear is far and away the most cost efficient means to do so.
When coal and gas turbine plants cost millions to build, and nuclear plants cost
billions, it's going to have a significant impact on the total cost of energy generated over the lifetime of those plants, having nothing at all to do with the efficiency of the method used. And lets not kid ourselves here, from a design and safety perspective, a nuclear power plant is certainly more costly than other forms of energy, but not an order of magnitude or two more costly. Something beyond just the complexity of design and cost of materials is involved here, and it's not that hard to see that it has a lot more to do with politics than science or engineering.