Like, imagine something maybe 1000x as complicated as your car, that has to work reliably 100% of the time for 50+ years .
Now imagine that we don’t have any practice building one of these things because people have been scared of building them for approximately 40 years, so the last person to make one is 70-90.
Now imagine that the failure case for this thing is a disaster that causes an expensive cleanup in the surrounding area, so no one will insure the project against that unless you pay an astronomical amount. Now add in that you’re using a “new” design that’s never been tested, and you have to follow a bunch of government regulations that didn’t even exist when the last comparable reactor was built.
Stack up all these things and you get a lot of uncertainty about project scope, uncertainty about financing, and uncertainty about whether it will work.
This means that to ballpark what it was cost, it will necessarily be expensive because of the risk everyone is taking in producing it.
You're right, however nearly every single point was also true 50 years ago, when we built many of these things around the globe (and many are still going, pumping out the cleanest energy the world has ever seen).
The real difference between then and now, is willingness to take on risk. Developed countries of today are essentially victims of the innovators dilemma. We're fat and happy and complacent, and that's why we will never have anything new or better. People in developed countries don't even want the inconvenience of having children anymore. Why take risk to make things better for the next generation when we're not even willing to create them?
Not really, the original set had “defense” backing because of the Cold War, because nukes are useful for making, well, nukes. (As well as being an alternative to fossil fuels in the situation where that supply chain broke down).
Which means we’d spend any amount of money on them and they’re a strategic asset.
Many safer designs are (basically) useless for enrichment, (pebble bed, molten salt thorium, w/e), which means the military might use one on an aircraft carrier or remote outpost, if they had any reason to (which they don’t as there’s no NIMBYism far out at sea). But safer designs are likely cheaper to run long term as the failure modes are significantly less catastrophic. (Not that the current gen ones are particularly dangerous).
I think this is false now thanks to fusion demonstrations, and maybe false because of things like solar and wind, although those do cost petroleum investment in equipment.
And rare earth minerals. And God help you if you're trying to use it to replace a steady source of energy with them, because the battery requirements go parabolic. Though, we are seeing some innovation in the battery space that replaces some of those rare earth minerals with more abundant and less hard to mine materials, such as zinc.
Now imagine that we don’t have any practice building one of these things because people have been scared of building them for approximately 40 years, so the last person to make one is 70-90.
Now imagine that the failure case for this thing is a disaster that causes an expensive cleanup in the surrounding area, so no one will insure the project against that unless you pay an astronomical amount. Now add in that you’re using a “new” design that’s never been tested, and you have to follow a bunch of government regulations that didn’t even exist when the last comparable reactor was built.
Stack up all these things and you get a lot of uncertainty about project scope, uncertainty about financing, and uncertainty about whether it will work.
This means that to ballpark what it was cost, it will necessarily be expensive because of the risk everyone is taking in producing it.