Technically I am an optimist. 50 Billion for fission plants and we are done. Socially, I am a pessimist----this is the perfect problem to defeat our institutions.
Problem with the startup crowd is they tend to get the former better than the latter.
Problem with the startup crowd is they tend to get the former better than the latter.
Would you mind telling me, how war you want to go on the second graph? Thx
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
I think each one costs around $10 billion; I don't think 5 nuclear power plants will solve climate change.
You'd need 3 of those plants to replace all electrical generation on earth, assuming they're at a 95% capacity factor. So call it a trillion dollars, maybe. Then you've got to look at total energy usage, which is order of magnitude larger, at 120TWh, so you'd need 12 to supply every energy need of current civilization. Maybe ~$50 trillion all included.
So one year of the entire world's productive output.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Cu...
That, and it hasn't exactly been proven to work stably yet (Note that the OP said fission, not fusion).
Note that at these prices it is cheaper to build solar, and in some cases (and places) solar AND pumped hydro power storage.
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-as...