The earliest nuclear power plants in the US were far more expensive than contemporary fossil combustion plants. I can dig up specific cited numbers if you doubt

The earliest nuclear power plants in the US were far more expensive than contemporary fossil combustion plants. I can dig up specific cited numbers if you doubt it. The US has built 114,694 megawatts of power reactors [1]. The US has built less than 100,000 megawatts of solar PV as of 2019 [2]. If both technologies need equal numbers of megawatts to reach equal maturity levels, nuclear should be more mature. (Obviously the number of projects is always going to be smaller for nuclear, since solar projects are as small as a few kilowatts on a rooftop, and nuclear projects are all measured in megawatts.) The AP1000 units under construction at Vogtle started construction in 2013. That was 56 years after Shippingport Atomic Power Station and Vallecitos Nuclear Center started operation in Pennsylvania and California. As of February 2013, the 2 AP1000 units at Vogtle were supposed to cost $15.3 billion. As of December 2017 the estimate had increased to $23 billion. The big mystery is why the costs were so badly under-estimated only 4 years earlier. Construction started after Three Mile Island, after Chernobyl, after Fukushima, after 50+ years of commercial power reactors in the US, and after regulatory requirements had changed to address prior nuclear incidents. The initial cost estimate should have accounted for all those factors. Will the next nuclear project account for them better? "How the Vogtle Nuclear Expansion’s Costs Escalated" https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-costs-escalated/ https://www.powermag.com/how-the-vogtle-nuclear-expansions-c... [1] Summing column "Reference unit power" from IAEA Power Reactor Information System https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=US https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_States#Solar_PV_installed_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Stat...