Comment by mikeyouse

It’s more of an opportunity cost issue than anything else. That $15B nuke plant will need to sell power at $0.15 wholesale or some such figure to break even. You need to give them $15B today for the promise of power generation revenue in 10+ years — or you could spend $1.5B/year building all sorts of other generation and earn commiserate revenue within months after groundbreaking.

New nuke power is something like 5x more expensive than wind or solar — which buys a lot of storage. Existing nuke power is ~about the same cost as renewables so it’s obvious we should keep them running but the case for building new ones is really hard to make.