Nuclear has very high up front costs. There are estimates that with reasonable transmission losses, putting solar satalites into orbit with Falcon 9 would already be cost competitive with nuclear. Starship should bring this down even more, perhaps even an order of magnitude. At which point there would be zero use case for new nuclear fission plants.
Now, this is comparing a hypothetical satellite system with actually built nuclear projects. That said, nuclear fission power is an economic dead end. Advocates have been so caught up in talking about the safety aspects (mostly talking points built in the 90s against Greenpeace and never changed) that they haven’t addressed the actual reason nobody wants to build them: they suck copious amounts of money in the build out and blow their construction schedule.
Nuclear has very high up front costs. There are estimates that with reasonable transmission losses, putting solar satalites into orbit with Falcon 9 would already be cost competitive with nuclear. Starship should bring this down even more, perhaps even an order of magnitude. At which point there would be zero use case for new nuclear fission plants.
Now, this is comparing a hypothetical satellite system with actually built nuclear projects. That said, nuclear fission power is an economic dead end. Advocates have been so caught up in talking about the safety aspects (mostly talking points built in the 90s against Greenpeace and never changed) that they haven’t addressed the actual reason nobody wants to build them: they suck copious amounts of money in the build out and blow their construction schedule.