Perfect Example Of Solar Zealots' Hype

In Gizmag,

It's hard to envisage that sort of system working effectively until you tweak the temperature variables and scale the whole thing up. Put this tower in a hot desert area, where the daytime surface temperature sits at around 40 degrees Celsius (104 F), and add in the greenhouse effect and you've got a temperature under your collector somewhere around 80-90 degrees (176-194 F).

Ahh, so THAT's why solar towers aren't built anywhere. Kind of a big disadvantage. And puts the scorcher on those stupid plans to have green greenhouses underneath. For free! Yeah right. Well, I always hated that stupid Desertec crap.

The amazing thing is that this paragraph above is exactly 1 paragraph and 1 photo distant from the following marketroid hype:

Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;

Far from consumers. Since when has this been an advantage?

It emits absolutely no pollution - the only emission is warm air at the top of the tower. In fact, because you're creating a greenhouse underneath, it actually turns out to be remarkably good for growing vegetation under there.

Yes that's right, they say that 80-90 degrees celsius is "remarkably good for growing vegetation under there". That's the Worshipers of the Sun God Ra for you, incapable of common sense or of comprehending 'logical contradiction'.

Oh that's right, apparently I made a mistake in assuming these would be EARTH vegetables underneath those solar towers. No, all along it was supposed to be Vulcan vegetables. I feel so stupid now.

Future of Nuclear

There are many incredibly ridiculous people who talk about transitioning away from nuclear power and towards weak ambient power sources (the propagandistically misnamed "renewables"). In these people's views, the world is entirely static and unchanging but there is this magical fairy called The Future that will transform their chosen power source (through magic) to do anything they wish, irregardless of the laws of physics.

Ridiculous is a grossly inaccurate term for this batshit insane magical thinking. I happen to know all of the developments promised for wind, solar and nuclear and while some of the future developments of wind (but not solar) are impressive, they don't actually nullify that source of energy's inherent weaknesses. And future developments in nuclear power aren't "impressive", they are revolutionary.

Some of these ridiculous people are putting a 25 year timeline to "transition away" from nuclear power. Which is entirely ridiculous and unrealistic. At least if they'd said 100 years then I could allow for solar power satellites or other such technology but whatever. Within 25 years, wind power will almost certainly gain high altitude from kites, wings or other techniques and so bump up to a solid 40% reliability onshore, improve economics and siting issues, and reduce the infrasound pollution problems.

Nuclear Revolution

Within 25 years, revolutionary technologies like small nuclear, high temperature nuclear and nuclear gas turbines will all come online. With some luck even thorium, molten salt and chemist's designs will be developed, though the time horizon there is more realistically 40 years to deployment. Why do I say these are revolutionary? Well,

• small nuclear plants will do away with the enormous expense (and unsightliness) of long-distance transmission lines, something that wind power will never be able to do since it actually multiplies transmission lines (another dirty side of wind power that's rarely spoken of)
• high temperature nuclear will be vastly more efficient (thus cheaper) and assuming the temperature is high enough allow entirely new applications like providing heat for industrial process, something ambient power sources will NEVER be able to do (sun-powered forges have been tried & failed already while electric arc furnace mills will move out of the country rather than pay for expensive electricity)
• nuclear gas turbines will allow NPPs to be dispatched (ramp up and down) very rapidly, opening up the potential to displacing single-cycle gas turbines and even hydroelectric dams. The competitor here is natural gas, ambient power sources need not apply!

So in 25 years, nuclear power will be entrenched as never before. It will definitely be powering mining sites, oil rigs, remote towns, and small islands. It will probably be competing against hydroelectric dams. And it will possibly be used in the chemical industry at refineries.

Thorium, molten salt, and chemists' designs are all equally as revolutionary, though their advantages are far more esoteric. Things the typical end user hardly cares about but the mining industry, nuclear industry and politicians definitely will.

In other words, for all the delusional crap about transitioning "away from" nuclear power, the reality is the future will involve transitioning TOWARDS nuclear power. Something we have honestly just barely begun. Something even France has barely begun when you keep in mind the massive potential of nuclear power.

Not Just Energy

And I haven't even mentioned laser enrichment which will collapse the price of fuel for nuclear power plants down to raw uranium, utterly changing the game there. It will also drastically shorten the acquisition period for nuclear bomb material, as well as make this activity undetectable. Both of which are excellent news for everyone who hasn't lived under the umbrella of peace provided by nuclear missiles. Something which anyone who's read about the confrontation Khrushchev had with the suicidal madman JFK will agree with.

Yes so when I said we had a glorious nuclear future, I wasn't restricting this to nuclear energy. The only fly in this ointment is truck bombs. Nuclear truck bombs to be exact. Bombs whose provenance you can't trace. Missiles are great for peace. Truck bombs, not so much. Or are they? Maybe a few rich cities getting blown up by terrorists will make the world's rich people take seriously the demands of disenfranchised poor people. When a poor person can light a nuclear fire in your gated community, the balance of power between rich and poor is going to change drastically. We'll be living in very interesting times.

I won't mourn when Tel Aviv is incinerated. I'll be too busy laughing at all the politicians scrambling to remake this world into a socialist paradise where poor people are happy, happy, happy.

Germany's New Old Anti-Nuclear Stance

I was asked to comment about the seeming about-face in nuclear policy in Germany. Well, there is no about-face in Germany. They were always nutso anti-human romantic fascists on the subject of energy and always will be.

The narrative seems to be "we trusted the nuclear industry and they lied" but this is a blatant fucking lie. They NEVER trusted nuclear power. They are delusional fuckers if they think they ever did. The nuclear industry is by far the safest industry. Safest does not mean "risk-free" since NOTHING like that is even remotely theoretically possible. Even if you had an entirely white-collar industry, you could still say that X engineers died of heart attacks during the tenure of their jobs. Or that X artificial intelligences died from their supporting hardware undergoing proton decay.

But "risk-free" is the exact standard the Germans want it since they hate, positively HATE, nuclear power as a deep down gut reaction. It isn't even paranoia, it's hatred. Any misstep, any stumble, even one that is recovered from fully, is an excuse to hate nuclear power as far as the Germans are concerned. The reason I say this is the extreme similarity between the poor white racists in the USA and Germans, each claiming victim status to justify their hatred.  It isn't fear they're displaying since fear is something to be fought and conquered. They're displaying resentment, bitterness and smug vindication. All emotions tightly associated with hatred.

You probably have no idea but the media over there in Germany is claiming that 1) Fukushima is as bad as Chernobyl, a claim which is unbelievably bald-faced lying since the radiation at the front gate of Fukushima at its worst was never as bad as 20 kilometers away from Chernobyl. 2) the exclusion zone the Japanese drew will be a permanent radioactive graveyard for the next 100,000 years. Another claim which is unbelievable in the sheer audacity of its lying since radiation levels should die down to insignificance around Fukushima within a year. And this year-long period is a severe blow to me personally since I expected it to be done within 3 months or so before I looked up the facts.

The exclusion zone in Japan could last for longer than a year for purely political reasons. Just as surely the anti-nuclear revival in Japan could continue. But I have severe doubts that will happen given that Japan is up against the wall economically. And they were up against the wall BEFORE the tsunami hit and did one trillion yen in damage and killed ten thousand people. Can Japan afford expensive anti-human policies? No. Will the political pressures for rational industrial policies overwhelm the anti-human hatred? That is a very good question and I am eager to see.

Needless to say, Germany is a lost cause. But then again, I considered it a lost cause ever since Merkel started talking about raiding the German nuclear industry in order to pay for the morbidly obese subsidies they've given the parasitic German solar and wind industries. Because of course they couldn't kill off those deadbeat industries even when the German government is running ridiculous deficits. No, I had my "what the fuck is this shit?!?" moment about the German nuclear industry a long time ago. Germany's attitude after Fukushima barely made me pause. Though the German media's blatant lying about what did and will happen at Fukushima did piss me off.

Orwellism isn't limited to the USA

So-called "third way" politics in the last decade meant right-wingers using left-wing rhetoric. It was loathesome crap. Fortunately it was self-limiting since "third way" politicians couldn't get away with their lies when their subjects were suffering for it.

More worrying is so-called "civil society" which refers to NGOs paid for and ruled by aristocrats. (They follow the corporate model with shareholders after all, not the cooperative model at all.) What "civil society" means as an ideal is the opposition to responsible government (whether democratic or dictatorial) in favour of rule by aristocrats ... through the back door.

The development of "civil society" is a scourge on any country that has it. China most recently has been beset by nutballs promoting weak ambient power sources (so-called "renewables"). South Korea has been beset by anti-nuclear nutballs.

While we're on the topic, so-called "renewables" are another Orwellism since there is nothing particularly renewable about power derived from thermonuclear reactions in the Sun that doesn't apply to fission power derived from burning already radioactive remnants of supernovae.

Remnants that can be found in plenty both in the granite that makes up all mountains and in the seawater of every ocean. Cheaply enough to be economical too, if we had to go that route. And since the Sun will become unusable in a mere 5 billion years whereas thorium should still be usable for ten billion of years, fission is actually MORE "renewable".

This scourge of "civil society" has brought about calamity in nation after nation. Witness the so-called "environmental" (another Orwellism! they're really the anti-industrial / anti-human movement) NGOs in Germany which flourished so well under Nazism.

Thanks to its "environmental" movement, Germany has a psychotic national energy policy, one totally divorced from physical reality. Billions of euros are being forcibly taken from ratepayers and taxpayers in order to "pay" for "investments" that produce neither electricity nor reduce CO2 emissions.

And it's not just money going down the drain or Germans being impoverished thanks to the ideals of fascists. It's also Germany's nuclear know-how that's stagnating and being dismantled instead of flourishing and sharpening. It's also tens of thousands of Europeans having their lives shortened thanks to German coal plants.

The so-called "environmental" NGOs only reveal themselves as the bought and paid for aristocratic, anti-human scum they are when they fail to protest coal plants (in the USA) or natural gas plants (in Germany) despite both of these putting out copious greenhouse gases.

No, Orwellism isn't limited to the USA. It's found all over the world. Because of course there are magical-thinking idiots willing and eager to buy that double-speaking tripe the world over.

Orwellism is also found in every subject. History for example. How many people know Sparta as the loathsome North Korea-esque cesspit of oppression it really was? How many people know Plato and Socrates as the lying anti-democratic pieces of shit they really were?

Apparently George Lucas was right, people are not only magical-thinking idiots, they're the kinds of idiots that desperately want to be ruled by kings. And you know what? I sincerely desire they get exactly what they wish for. Because I want to see their faces when they're being lashed and I get to tell them 'I told you so you dumb motherfucker'.

Fusion Will NEVER Be Viable

I've never been interested in fusion because I knew it wouldn't be viable for at least 50 years. Why bother worrying or hyping about it when it's crap? Well, I just did a spot of research into it and what I've found is simply amazing.

The main line of research is crap because the fuel they need to use (tritium) would cost millions per kilogram. This compares extremely poorly to uranium which can be had for less than 100$ per kg. Even extracting uranium from seawater costs less than 1000$ per kilogram.

Note that there isn't much conversion needed since all proposed fusion processes produce energy per kilogram of fuel at rates roughly equivalent to fission of uranium.

Let's not forget the fact that D-T fusion produces 30 times (*) the amount of neutron radiation per kilogram as uranium fission. Neutron radiation is the kind that causes things to become radioactive. I hope you love nuclear waste because D-T fusion makes fission look waste-free.

The yo-yos who want to go to the moon to mine Helium-3 say crap like "that 25-tonne load of He3 would worth on the order of $75 billion today, or $3 billion per tonne". Of course, this is a blatant lie. Helium-3 isn't worth $3 billion per tonne, it costs $3 billion per tonne. What it's actually worth if you're using it as fuel in a fusion power plant is less than $50,000 per tonne, or 60,000 times less than they're claiming.

This doesn't mean that helium-3 mining can't happen economically. It just can't happen with chemical rockets. You need nuclear (fission) rockets to get to the moon and mine that helium-3 economically. And I'm really assuming here that it'll be economical, but if you're going to be using nuclear fission rockets, if nuclear fission has gained that much political and social respectability, then why bother with a fusion reactor at all?

Why harness the power of a twinkling little star when you can harness the power of a supernova? That's where all Uranium comes from, from the r-process running up the neutron drip line, from the blazing heart of an exploding stellar super-giant. The hype around fusion defies comprehension even as mindless sun worship. Don't people realize our sun is nothing, nothing, compared to something that outshines a galaxy. It's like wishing to cuddle up to a candle when you have a roaring bonfire next to you.

But that's not where the fun ends with fusion research. You see, there's an "alternative" line of research which advertises being able to use everyday normal crap like Borax (boron) and that its reactors will be so cheap they could be built in someone's garage ....

Well problem is they can only do that if the fuel is totally pure. Boron must be purified from 80% to >99.7%, otherwise those dippy little reactors built in people's garages will kill everybody near them. The best part is that even though Borax costs $2 per kilo, pure boron costs around $5000-10,000 per kilogram depending on its purity. And you want to use that for fuel? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Don't expect any economies of scale either since industry is already making the stuff in massive quantities.

But the fun doesn't end there. You see, pure boron in fusion reactors wouldn't cut it. No siree, you need pure boron-11. Because if you shoved any boron-10 (which is 20% of natural boron) into your garage-built fusion reactor, it would ... kill everyone around it. What you really want is pure boron-11 and as it happens we do have plenty of boron-11 around since boron-10 is used as a neutron radiation absorbent by ... the nuclear fission industry.

So you see, it's beautiful. It really is. If you try to build fusion reactors to replace fission reactors then those fusion reactors won't have any fuel. The only way we'd ever have little fusion reactors in people's garages is if we have giant fission plants in every city.

*: deuterium (2 nucleons) + tritium (3 nucleons) -> helium-4 (4 nucleons) + 1 neutron for 20% of mass. In comparison, uranium (235 nucleons) + neutron -> a smorgasbord of stuff + 2.5 neutrons on average, for a net production of 1.5 neutrons (0.6% of mass) on average.

Reply to a Tree Hugger's Change of Heart on Nuclear

Here is my reply to Geoff Russel's 'Rethinking Nuclear'. For obvious reasons, it will disappear from Geoff's site.

In order to reduce the USA's CO2 emissions by just half, carbon has to be completely eliminated from the power generation industry. Carbon can be eliminated from power generation quite easily by adopting nuclear power plants. It can be eliminated at a massive profit, with the side-effect of freeing up most rail transport capacity from coal transport, thus making railways a viable passenger transport again. It cannot ever be eliminated by any combination of solar, wind or other ambient (what you mistakenly call "renewables") power. The sun doesn't shine at midnight and the wind never blows throughout the night.

These are simple and obvious facts. Renewables are a very bad technology if your goal is to decarbonize the power industry. You claim to have that goal. And if you do not then you are an idiot. But having that goal, your proposed solution is an epic failure. Thus you are an idiot.

It's worse than that. You seriously propose a politically non-viable perfect solution (IFR) against a semi-viable good solution (Gen III). That makes you an idiot squared.

It's even worse than that. For decades, you have been mindlessly railing about the "risks" of nuclear power out of a puerile hatred of big business. In all of that time you didn't give a flying fuck about the millions dying from poverty, the lack of electrification, and the lack of industrialization. Fuck no, you loved that they were dying.

You said it yourself, the only thing that changed the game for you is another hysterical paranoid threat to your personal survival, the threat of global warming. Because nobody (big business) and nothing (nuclear) can ever be allowed to ameliorate and better the world unless YOUR fat white elite ass benefits. You are a despicable scumbag and an idiot to the third power.

And that's not even the worst part of it. Because you see, the worst part of it is that you are a lying fucking HYPOCRITE. You go out of your way to accuse and condemn Howard & Zwitkowski of craven selfish cronyism. Craven selfish cronyism which you engage in yourself!

You are an abomination to all that is good. You are a blight on this planet and in this universe. You are an offense to morality. You are a stain on moral humanity.

My most serious proposal for how you personally can better the world is this. Shoot yourself. Put a bullet through your head and spare the world of the misery of having you in it. That is how you can best help save the world. By removing your miserable awe-inspiring idiocy from it.

I'm reproducing this comment on my blog since idiots, lacking the capacity for a rational response, do idiotic things when the offensive truth is pointed out. But hey, the notion of the unvarnished truth being offensive is exceedingly offensive to me.

The Hydrogen Economy

Idiots parrot all the time how the Hydrogen Economy is going to save the status quo. To a first order analysis this is ludicrous since fuel cells are overcomplexified expensive pieces of crap and hydrogen can't be transported.

However, say we did away with all the futuristic vapourware, what could "hydrogen economy" possibly mean then? Well, it could mean very high temperature nuclear reactors that produce hydrogen thermochemically at very high efficiencies. Assuming the hydrogen produced were cheap enough, there are plenty of applications for it.

Reducing iron ore to pig iron would be one of them. Pig iron can be efficiently turned to steel in an electric arc furnace, without the use of coal. By that point in time, all electricity would be produced by nuclear reactors and coal power plants would have been removed from the equation.

So what would happen to the current production of 1 billion tonnes of coal annually? Well some of it would certainly go to calcinating clinker for concrete cement. Assuming this could be displaced somehow, and assuming enough hydrogen were produced cheaply enough, then it should be possible to transform all of that coal into some synthetic fuel.

Currently, coal to liquids is extremely expensive partly because some of the coal must be burned in order to produce the hydrogen to synthesize the hydrocarbon chains. Assuming this weren't a problem then 1 billion tonnes of coal per year converts into about 30 million barrels per day of synthetic fuel. This falls far short of the current 80 million barrels per day the world uses but it's certainly ... interesting.

Ambient Power

Eco-zealots always whine that if only so-called "renewable" sources of energy had gotten as much research & development money as nuclear then they would have become just as profitable.

Well first of all, we're really talking about ambient energy since nuclear is just as renewable as anything powered by the Sun. The Uranium and Thorium our planet inherited from supernovas during its formation is only going to disappear through radioactive decay. And that won't be for many billions of years.

Second of all, nuclear power became profitable within a decade of its invention. Meanwhile, it's been more than 140 years since photovoltaics have been invented, and more than four decades since NASA has been funding their R&D, and what do we have? Bupkis. What does that tell you?

People seem to think that engineering can do anything, achieve anything. That it's just a question of waving your magic fairy wand and pouring enough money into it. Well it's not. And it's really very, very simple why it isn't. It goes like this:

1. solar power is a DIFFUSE form of power
2. this means that you need a MACHINE to concentrate solar power
3. in our physical universe, a machine must be made of MATTER
4. matter COSTS MONEY

Add it all up and what do you get? Solar power will always be more expensive than nuclear power. Always. Now and for all time.

The only reason hydro doesn't suffer the same fate is because we can use pre-existing mountains and ravines as the collectors. Once dam-builders have to pay for mountains, and this will happen when we start dismantling the Earth for a Dyson sphere, then hydro power will no longer be profitable.

Ambient forms of energy are inherently inferior and no amount of chanting by arch-druids and channeling the power of Gaia is going to change physics.

How To Think About EROEI

Some eco-zealots claim the nuclear industry has an EROEI of 10 or 2 or even negative. Ha!

The right way to think about EROEI is to invert it. 1/EROEI is, more or less, the proportion of your industrial economy which must be devoted to producing energy. This assumes the energy industry is no more energy-intensive than other sectors of industry. A not-unreasonable assumption.

So if you have an EROEI of 10 then 1/10th or 10% of your industrial economy must be devoted to producing the energy for the rest of the industrial economy. If you have an EROEI of 30 then this falls to 1/30th or 3%, for a 7 percentage point difference.

Given that booms to recessions happen on a change of just a few percentage points in production, 7 pps of energy overhead matters a hell of a lot. Actually, even pushing up the EROEI to 90 reduces the overhead to 1% which improves the industrial economy. Pushing the EROEI beyond 90 can't improve the industrial economy significantly and that would explain why it isn't done.

Having said all that, you have to ask yourself whether or not you would have noticed if 1/10th of ALL industry everywhere (steelmaking, concrete kilns, road building, automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding, even television manufacturing) was devoted to just producing energy.

You have to ask yourself whether an EROEI of just 10 for a vital component of the energy sector (and nearly ALL of the energy sector of France) passes any kind of sanity checks.

And if you still want to know, nuclear power has an EROEI of 90.

Why Nuclear Plants Shouldn't Be Made Safer

By Carolus Obscurus in response to a (poor) article on nuclear's EROEI.

In spite of theoretical safety concerns, in practise in the West nuclear power has been several orders of magnitude safer than coal, which has killed plenty of people.

In fact, nuclear plants are so safe that their safety may have been counterproductive --- it can argued that for every life saved in improving the safety of nuclear plants several lives have been lost in constructing those super-safe plants. Can't present a graph here but obviously at some stage the rising fatal accident rate associated with increased investments in constructing safe buildings will intersect with the declining fatal accident rate resulting from the added safety.

Not easy to explain to the general public, though. The individual deaths of 100 construction workers employed in building nuclear plants is not headline news. But if a sparrow falls within a radius of ten miles of an operating nuclear power station Greenpeace and co. will start turning on the waterworks ....

Sparrows near Three Mile Island at leukemia risk, Greenpeace claims

Unemployment in Europe

These were a couple of the comments in a reddit thread today about European unemployment.

Hang around playing xbox and commenting on reddit about how much the US sucks - much like everyone else in Germany. Nyuck nyuck nyuck.

I know! It's the same in Sweden (i spend some time there)...
Socialised hispeed internet is a killer of motivation!

Which got me to thinking, this is bad? I'd like to point everyone to the fact that natural resources are becoming scarce. All useful jobs have to do with the extraction, transformation and distribution of these natural resources. Which are becoming scarce.

So useful jobs are scarce. Either people must scale back their motivation or they must become destructive. Germans and Swedes have decided on the former, Americans and English on the latter.

As petrol, lumber, land, grain, wool, rubber, steel, copper, and all other commodities become increasingly scarce, we can either be satisfied with less or we can fight more energetically for what's left.

And don't anyone dare say that everyone should become a programmer / engineer or artist / designer. Most people don't have the analytical functioning for the former, or the creativity for the latter.

Mind you, I'm not a doomer. In fact, I consider doomers to be anti-civilization scum. The current scarcity of natural resources is not a permanent fact of life. It's a product of China and to a lesser extent India rapidly modernizing.

When Nautilus Minerals' venture finally comes online, massive new sources of copper, gold and other minerals will increase their supply.

When 2nd generation high temperature superconductors become available, the demand for copper for generators will be vastly reduced.

And when the world starts building nuclear power plants and mass transit systems in earnest, then demand for petrol and coal will be reduced while supply of both electricity and transportation will increase.

Scarcity of natural resources and the poverty it is associated with,, are not inevitable. They're just unavoidable right now. We might as well make the best of our situation by kicking back and taking it easy.

Reply To People Who've Put Up Solar Panels

So you've put up a bunch of solar panels for 20,000 USD out of pocket, and another 20,000 in government subsidies, and you'll get free electricity for 20 years? Think you got a good deal? Think again. Wouldn't you prefer something reliable that met ALL of your electric needs? Something that worked everywhere on Earth? Something that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg?

You could start a nuclear-consumers' coop. Get together with a million people in your area and build your own nuclear power plant. It would only cost you about 5,000 per person for 2 kilowatts each. This is much, MUCH cheaper than solar panels for equivalent capacity. And it would last a solid 60 years, not 20-30 years.

Because if you live in the USA then you can actually do that. The NRC has several nuclear power plant designs with blanket approval. You need a site license but once you have that, you just build the power plant as designed and run. There's a rogue power company that's willing to build and operate a power plant wherever in the country you want one. They've already considered a nuclear power plant in Idaho so they'd be willing to do it. So you'd just partner with them though you might have to partner with your local utility too. But if your State allows you to specify where your power comes from ....

One problem would be getting the heavy forgings. There's only 8 forges in the world that can cast ingots in the 40 tonne category. You'd need to order (dozens) from one of them. They require a deposit so pretty much as soon as you order your nuclear power plant, long before the parts arrive, 80% of its cost is locked in. You'd also have to manage the permit approval process since it takes a 30-50 million or so just to apply.

The big advantage you have is that if a million people are willing to put up 5,000 each then your cost of money is rock bottom. Even if you give them 5% on their money, that's still rock bottom. Your disadvantage is that you'd need to organize all of this. Your really big advantage is that once it was organized, it would be impossible to kill. Power generation projects by private generators meet a LOT of resistance. With publically-owned utilities, a lot less. With a community owned utility? It'd be a dream come true.

Now let's talk about money. The AP1000, that's one of the designs approved by the NRC, would cost 1000-1400 USD per MW. For 1 million people each with 2 kW that's 2 GW so we're talking two plants for 2000-2800. Construction and financing are 58% of the costs of an AP1000 so at 5000 per person you've covered construction, financing, fuel, maintenance, operation for 60 years and decommissioning at the end of it all.

It's possible, not likely but possible, that you run into political resistance. If you do then you'll want to take advantage of the deal in the Nuclear Programme 2010 which covers part of construction cost overruns. Which would be minimal since those are generally due to delays and the increased cost of financing, which you don't worry about because you've got cheap money. It's also likely you'd get a discount on the 2000-2800 since hey cheap money again. And if you take advantage the the NP2010 then you get some spare change from Congress for your trouble during the first 8 years of operation. A few tens of million each year for 8 years, not a lot of money. If the NP2010 is used up before you get your chance though that's actually even better since other generators will have taken the early risks before you.

And of course, there's always a bailout option. The AREVA consortium ordered their heavy forgings before they had approval even for their nuclear reactor design. Because they knew that if worse came to worse, they could always reuse those forgings in Flammanville, France where another nuclear power plant is going up. They got to cut time at no risk. With a standard design, it's entirely possible you could buy yourself an insurance (a guarantee of a buyer) in case things don't work out.

Doable? Definitely. You just need to get up the gumption to actually do it. Free electric generation for 60 years. Think about it.