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It’s definitely an expense. But this doesn’t fully explain why nuclear is expensive.

-Current nuclear reactors aren’t nearly hot enough to need single crystal turbine blisks. We’re talking on the order of 300°C.

-Coal power plant routinely hit much higher temperatures in supercritical and ultra-supercritical (yes, that’s a real term) steam generators. We don’t have quite as bad a problem building coal power plants.

-We’re not currently building molten salt reactors for power generation.

You didn’t say anything that was wrong. I’m just don’t think this is the reason building reactors is so expensive.



Yeah, the high tech blades occur in combustion turbines.

A simple cycle combustion turbine power plant might have 5% of the capital cost per watt of a nuclear power plant.




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