Now, consider you have a pile of coal with 100 tWh of thermal energy. We have two choices: burn it and get 37.5 tWh of electric, or use it to build a nuclear power plant that will produce 500 tWh of steam over the course of its life. The nuclear plant seems like a much better choice, But remember, that steam in the nuclear power plant does us little good unless we convert it to electricity. That gives us about 187 tWh. Still 187tWh over the life of the reactor sounds better than a one-shot of 37.5 tWh when the coal is burnt directly, so that sounds like a good energy investment. But, of course, we need to consider all the other costs of nuclear (uranium enrichment, labor, waste materials, decommissioning, etc.). And when we add it all up, we find that nuclear reactors are often uneconomical, and require government subsidies to keep running. ((
Clifford, 2022). Few plants are even being built any more. (
Davis, 2012,
Clifford, 2023).
And in the future it will be much harder to justify nuclear. Do the math. Lets say the pile of coal is gone, and we now need to use electricity from an existing nuclear plant to build our next plant. We don't even have the furnaces to make the components using electric, but lets say we can make them. Now we use 100 tWh of electricity instead of 100 tWh of coal to create the next nuclear plant that will eventually give us 187 tWh electricity output. Suddenly the cost justification becomes much harder, Now, instead of giving up the resulting 37.5 tWh of electricity we would get from that coal, we give up 100 tWh from the nuclear plant. And we still have all the existing problems that are driving investors away from building nuclear plants now.
