[AtlasBarfed]

Look, the elephant in the room is that if a power company wants to invest a billion dollars in power generation, they are going to do it with solar/wind. The project scales out, the cost is dropping constantly, and they get power generation early in the project.

A nuclear power plant is:

- a 10 year investment delay (with no return until completed)

- could be cancelled at any moment (high risk)

- with a very uncertain price target (solar/wind + grid storage will probably be half the cost or less of what it is today)

- can't be expanded

- very likely to balloon in cost and be a total financial quagmire

Solar/wind can be scalably purchased, installed, and expanded as needed. The costs will drop continuously, replacement and maintenance is easy, there's no nuclear waste to get rid of, and can very reliably be specced in terms of cost for generation.

[belorn]

Power companies that wants to invest a billion dollars in power generation will also invest into fossil fueled power delivery. Solar and wind produce a lot of cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but when the weather change and demand exceeds supply, the market price of energy goes to the roof. Last winter in Europe we saw prices spikes well over 100x of what the average market cost, which primarily went pay for fossil fueled power generation. Fossil fueled power delivery also get a lot of subsidizes in order to provide reserve energy, so they get the advantage of being paid twice.

Solar and wind is excellent investment for those wanting to compete when supply in the grid is high and prices are low. Nuclear, hydro, storage and fossil fuels are there to compete with supply is low and prices high.