Fantastic money for You.

NukeWorker.com Says:

7 September 2009 at 1:57 pm.

The Nuclear plants that are proposed for construction in the US in the next 1-10 years will cost between 5-7 billion dollars per reactor, depending on which design. In the past, they were built for as little as 300 million dollars.

* Provisional contracts for two 1,117 MWe AP1000 reactors at the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station have estimated final costs of approximately $4.9 billion per reactor. [1]

* On April 9, 2008, Georgia Power Company reached a contract agreement for two AP1000 reactors to be built at Vogtle, at an estimated final cost of $14 billion. [2]

The profit on a running reactor is about $1 million dollars a day, the cost is 5.93 cents per kWh, and includes Uranium for fuel, insurance, waste disposal, and employees like security.
The lifetime cost of new generating capacity in the United States was estimated in 2006 by the U.S. government: wind cost was estimated at $55.80 per MWh, coal (cheap in the U.S.) at $53.10, natural gas at $52.50 and nuclear at $59.30.
“Future costs” include the cost to decommission a reactor, which is currently around $300 million dollars.
If we expand the topic from electricity to energy in general, Nuclear Power really starts to get cheap. According to Dr. Arthur Robinson of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine: “The construction of just one nuclear power station like Palo Verde (CA) in each of the 50 states, with a full complement of 10 reactors, would supply all of the energy that the United States currently imports—with, in addition and at current prices, $300 billion per year worth of excess energy to export.”

Nuclear fission is the splitting of the nucleus of an atom into parts (lighter nuclei) often producing free neutrons and other smaller nuclei, which may eventually produce photons (in the form of gamma rays). Fission of heavy elements is an exothermic reaction which can release large amounts of energy both as electromagnetic radiation and as kinetic energy of the fragments (heating the bulk material where fission takes place). Fission is a form of elemental transmutation because the resulting fragments are not the same element as the original atom.

Nuclear energy is a way of creating heat through the fission process of atoms. All power plants convert heat into electricity using steam. At nuclear power plants, the heat to make the steam is created when atoms split apart — called fission. (Other types of power plants burn coal or oil for heat to make steam.)

The fission process take place when the nucleus of a heavy atom, like uranium or plutonium, is split in two when struck by a neutron. The “fissioning” of the nucleus releases two or three new neutrons.

It also releases energy in the form of heat. The released neutrons can then repeat the process. This releases even more neutrons and more nuclear energy. The repeating of the process is called a chain reaction. In a nuclear power plant, uranium is the material used in the fission process.

The heat from fission boils water and creates steam to turn a turbine. As the turbine spins, the generator turns and its magnetic field produces electricity. The electricity can then be carried to your home, so you can work on the computer, watch television, play video games, or make toast!

MW = Mega Watt (1 million watts)
kW= Kilo Watt (1 thousand watts)