Nuclear power is typically located close to power demands, ie cities, because of the costs and losses in transporting power over long distances. This also limits the size/scale of nuclear power plants, since if you build larger than the demands of a city, you have to transport the power over a long distance to find more sinks.
On the other hand, suppose a city were built specifically for the purpose of hosting nuclear power, carbon-capture, and CO2-to-fuel plants. Such a city might be able to have significantly cheaper nuclear power, since being far away from existing population centers would lower safety and regulatory costs, and concentrating production in one place might enable new economies of scale.
It seems like there are two worlds we could be in, here. In one world, nuclear power right now is like the space launch industry of a decade ago: very expensive, but expensive because of institutional failure and a need for R&D, rather than fundamental physics. In the other world, some component of power plants (steam turbines, for example) is already optimized close to reasonable limits, so an order of magnitude is not possible. Does anyone with engineering knowledge of this space have a sense of which is likely?
Nuclear power is typically located close to power demands, ie cities, because of the costs and losses in transporting power over long distances. This also limits the size/scale of nuclear power plants, since if you build larger than the demands of a city, you have to transport the power over a long distance to find more sinks.
On the other hand, suppose a city were built specifically for the purpose of hosting nuclear power, carbon-capture, and CO2-to-fuel plants. Such a city might be able to have significantly cheaper nuclear power, since being far away from existing population centers would lower safety and regulatory costs, and concentrating production in one place might enable new economies of scale.
It seems like there are two worlds we could be in, here. In one world, nuclear power right now is like the space launch industry of a decade ago: very expensive, but expensive because of institutional failure and a need for R&D, rather than fundamental physics. In the other world, some component of power plants (steam turbines, for example) is already optimized close to reasonable limits, so an order of magnitude is not possible. Does anyone with engineering knowledge of this space have a sense of which is likely?