No private capital even today has the kind of deep pockets or mountains of continual funding to setup national industrial development research organizations to get chip making going at the start of that technology, like they did in American and Japan, who pioneered most of technologies used to make integrate circuit chips at high volume at chip fabs today, like Intel or TSMC using class leading fab equipment from ASML in the Netherlands.
In a similar way most of the 454 operating nuclear fission power plants online making commercial electricity today were paid for by Government Funding since private capital investors are too impatient for a $20 billion project that only consumes money while under construction, verification, pre commercialization, development, certification, pre-commercialization and pre-start checks for safety for up to 12 years before the New Fission Power Plant goes critical in its core, where the nuclear chain reaction started, turning the cooling pool blue with a blight blue flash as it starts, after which the well made fission reactor can make commercial electricity for 80+ years, turning a 9000% ROI or return on investment once all the electricity it makes is sold to customers for end use of the energy.
The only practical MMR's in use today are the those of the US Navy's nuclear powered aircraft carriers and nuclear power submarines. Its hard to get accurate funding numbers from the pentagon, but we know they are not practical as commercial power sources to compete on the energy markets with electricity made using hydro, wind, geothermal, coal, natural gas, propane, diesel, gasoline, solar PV or solar thermal or by other means, in terms of LCOE or Levelized Cost of Installed Capacity.
In this metric, LCOE many renewables like large wind power turbines have the lowest upfront capitals costs per GW of installed capacity, but this picture becomes fuzzy when you consider capacity factor or load factor, since the wind not always blowing at the same speed, and the same can be said for intermittent renewable solar PV and Solar Thermals, since clouds and winter storms block the sun from hitting such resources during the winter when energy demand the greatest for heating colder locals to make buildings hospitable temperatures like 68 F or 20 C inside, when its freezing cold or 0 C or 32 F outside. This is where nuclear power and hydro really shine with 24/7 firm power or base load output, excellent load following and superior capacity factor.
Thus a mix of energy resources are needed to energize electrical grids in energy intensive consumer countries like America, and that is why, also because of the low cost of coal as a fuel, that coal power plants are still around operating making heat and power in America. Coal as a fuel can cost as low as $65 per ton, much cheaper than any other fuel. This is why Germany replaced nuclear with more coal power, since Germany has abundant cheap coal resources to exploit. I say exploit because cutting down mountains to make coal changes the biosphere and releases a lot of toxic emissions since coal power also the most deadly and more dangerous and more poisonous because of toxic coal power emissions of heavy toxic and even radioactive metals as fly ash + particles and soot and fumes and worse, since coal literally the dirtiest burning fuel and dirtiest way to make heat and power, but also the cheapest if you do not account for all the harm it causes.
Renewables like Wind and Solar become more expensive that New Nuclear, especially MMR and SMR, when enough energy storage capacity added to renewables to get make load following and capacity factor improve, since people need electricity 24/7 to enable modern life to happen in industrialized countries that generate a lot of economic activity, like America, China or many European countries with high levels of employment, not poor third world or developing countries with widespread poverty and 85+ % unemployment where most of the people are engaged in hand to mouth gardening for food, subject to winds of change if a storm knocks out their food plants or if wild animals come and eat their gardens. In this ways modern societies like America with grocery stores insulate working people from the direct effects of climate change, other than causing food prices to rise, in part because the US dollar keep weakening in terms of its buying power or loss of buying power, largely because of inflation or the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply with quantum easing to stabilize the US economy. All fiat currencies in history have failed, but are usually re-enumerated before that, like what Mexico did to Peso's with the New Peso in 1980.
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