The parts of a boat have funny names to a landsman. Many of the names go back hundreds of years and their origins are often lost. Some make sense only if you know something of sailing ship construction in the 16th century.
Cheap dreams, expensive realities. In the dawn of the nuclear era, cost was expected to be one of the technology's advantages, not one of its drawbacks. The first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, predicted in a 1954 speech that nuclear power would someday make electricity âtoo cheap to meter.â.
In 2014, the US Energy Information Administration estimated the levelized cost of electricity from new nuclear power plants going online in 2019 to be $0.096/kWh before government subsidies, comparable to the cost of electricity from a new coal-fired power plant without carbon capture, but higher than the cost from natural gas-fired plants.