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Notes -
Obviously a financial system can be distorted, but I'm assuming a financial system that's somewhat accurate and not being gamed for the purpose of this exercise. The main reason profit matters here is that a power generation system should be able to support more economic activity than it requires to keep itself running. If you have a powerplant that produces 50 dollars worth of power after you feed it 100 dollars of raw inputs/labour, you're either going to be running it for some other reason (isotopes maybe) or not at all.
Generally I agree that energy efficiency would mean profits, this is why I mentioned that I doubt profitability will remain a problem, once the alternatives are exhausted. That said, it's not impossible that due to some market funkiness the two metrics will become uncorrelated. If it turns out you have to pay everyone in the nuclear industry at least a 7 figure salary, so they don't fuck off to do high-frequency trading, or something else that's short-term profitable, but ultimately pointless, I say bite the bullet, and subsidize their salaries. What you're addressing with that move is income distribution, not energy efficiency.
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