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Actually, I don't think this is basic at all. Energy is such a fundamental part of the economy that increases in the cost of energy effectively act as a tax for all other economic activity, and there are vanishingly few sectors of the economy that are unaffected by shifts in the price of petroleum. There are petroleum derivatives in almost all modern technology, petroleum is used for transportation and extraction of resources, used to make soil more fertile, etc. What this means is that when you switch from incredibly cheap energy (oil/coal) to expensive energy (nuclear) you're applying additional overhead to all economic activity. Given the repeated failure of nuclear power generation to turn a profit, it remains an open question whether or not nuclear power would be able to provide enough energy overhead to sustain a modern industrial civilisation. But of course that runs into another problem...
Nuclear reactors are built with petroleum-powered construction equipment, use petroleum-derived components and are powered with fuel that is extracted via large mining vehicles running on petroleum, all the while being supplied by a transportation network based on petroleum. The price of oil is in fact a factor in the price of nuclear power, and as the price of oil rises the price of nuclear power will rise with it as only some of the necessary petroleum inputs can be replaced with coal or other sources of power. There simply is no known and usable power source that has the energy-density or broad swathe of additional uses and benefits brought by petroleum, and we're going to need that replacement to come online very quickly. And again, I don't think time is the correct metric to use here - will it really last that long if we're also replacing most of our petroleum usage with it as well?
I remain extremely confident it will be profitable to keep humanity alive.
It doesn't matter how much money you throw at the problem - if the EROEI is not high enough, it isn't a workable answer. Right now, nuclear power just isn't capable of sustaining a civilisation. If someone is willing to pay a billion dollars for me to turn a bit of lead into gold with alchemy, the amount of potential profit does nothing to change the fact that my alchemy laboratory can't actually transmute lead into gold.
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