Maintaining old plants may be economical but even that is fraught with risk (e.g. the RSG debacle at San Onofre) but looking at the few new nuclear projects und

Maintaining old plants may be economical but even that is fraught with risk (e.g. the RSG debacle at San Onofre) but looking at the few new nuclear projects under way makes it seem highly unlikely that they'll ever be worthwhile. The Vogtle upgrade has been underway for 6 years and is already 3 years behind schedule, it will have taken over a decade by the time it sells it's first watt to the grid. The total investment over that time will be something like $20 billion. I can't imagine a scenario in which tying up $20B in capital for a decade to produce 2.2GW of power makes any financial sense at all. With the EPA cost estimate of $1,000/KW for a natural gas plant, you could literally build 20GW of natural gas capacity and probably save 5 years in construction time. Wind is ~2x more expensive per installed MW, so build 10GW of wind capacity, even with their shitty 30% capacity factors you come out ahead of the Vogtle project. Hopefully the modular reactors come with much better economics but large scale nuclear is dead for a reason.