It comes out of the taxpayers' or ratepayers' pockets.
Solar power is so dilute, that even if you cover your roof with solar PV panels, many of the websites recommending it warn you that you probably cannot afford enough PV to run your air conditioners. $0.54/kWh is five or six times what I pay Dominion Electric. I divided the latest estimate of the cost of a TVA nuclear power plant, including the amount it had gone over budget, by the likely (using published EIA figures) energy output in a mere 20 years, and arrived at a figure of around $0.05/kWh. The fuel costs of nuclear power are trifling, because so little fuel is needed. If you want a decentralised, low maintenance, reliable, clean power source,
I know of a local company, in Reston, that would dearly love to have a licence for their 100MW reactor design, which I could just about fit in my 1/4 acre back yard, underground, and needs no refueling for 20 years. Then they send a new or refurbished fuel core, take the old one back, remove 8% of its mass and replace it with UN-enriched uranium, and the quantity they remove is the only waste for those 20 years. Oh, I forgot to mention, the initial fuel load is 20.7 tons. It's a breeder reactor. Ten of these would supply more energy than a 1000 MW coal burner. One of them would also exceed the energy output of 70 wind turbines, 500 or 600 feet high at the blade tip, rated at 5 MW. The capacity factor for wind turbines is from 20% to 33% and I believe the high figure is exaggerated. Their capacity factor "on demand" is of course zero.
