> if it was possible to make cheap power, you could just do it

And then men with guns come and take away your house.

You were doing the math on a pressurized water reactor, and all of the safety equipment that is expected when you have hot radioactive stuff under high pressure.

If you use molten fuel (not even a thorium breeder, just plain old boring uranium), you have no pressure to deal with, you could use ceramic pipes, a ceramic Archimedes pump, so basically you need beryllium and lithium fluoride, ceramic clay, u233, high purity graphite, a boiler & steam turbine, and lots and lots of concrete.

None of those things are that costly. They're not *cheap*, but they're not expensive in comparison to being able to crank out like 30kw of power all day and all night.

If it weren't for regulation, there'd be youtubers doing this, I'm sure of it.