I was simply trying to get an estimate of what one of these units would cost. Very true that I did not include the cost of money over time. It is hard to know if the fuel consumption is constant regardless of load. In other words if you only used half the capacity would it last twice (or any) longer?
In general, yes. That's how it works for the larger nukes. However, that's only the cost of the fuel, not the capital cost. I very much doubt that one fuel load is going to last the 40 years quoted in the article. I think the 40 years is the life of the unit. If it's priced like larger units, running it at half load doesn't save enough on fuel to make a difference to total cost
The price of nuke fuel is the lowest $/BTU option, which is why any utility with a nuke plant tries to keep it running at full load all the time.
The article would have to talk a lot more about the trade off between capital cost and fuel costs to know how to be most economical with one of these plants. My guess is that Toshiba would like to go to the model of the inkjet printer - sell the plant as cheap as possible, and the fuel as expensive as possible, which is the opposite from the economics of the larger nukes.