I work for one of largest U.S. utility companies who operates nuclear units. They've publicly stated there's no plan for increasing their nuclear footprint. Th

I work for one of largest U.S. utility companies who operates nuclear units. They've publicly stated there's no plan for increasing their nuclear footprint. The first thing you need to consider is nobody wants these things in their backyard, and I mean nobody. You're going to spend tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars facing the legal hurdles all the NIMBYs are going to hurl at you. Even if you manage to obtain a permit, which isn't that difficult actually, the NIMBYs are going to fight you every step of the way and will do everything they can to impede construction to force costs to skyrocket. Then there's the fact there's steps in the construction process that have to be done within a certain amount of time otherwise you have to scrap and start over. Do you know who knows those steps very well? The NIMBYs, of course. If they win a delay in those steps then they've effectively shut down the plant before it even got built. My company ran into this while building a new nuclear power plant back in 2008/2009. We ended up having to scrap it and built an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plant instead. The thing I remember most was Obama making a promise the year before the plant opened that there wouldn't be a new coal-fired power plant built in the U.S. So much for that! On the positive side, that was the last coal-fired power plant my company has built and they've retired several older units built in the 40's and 50's, since. When I started there, 40% of their power was from coal, now it's 20%. We own and operate the largest wind farms in the U.S. and we've deployed several solar farms and are in the midst of building more. Investors don't even want to hear the word nuclear. There have been a lot of modern coal plants built in the past 20 years. Maybe 20-30 years from now as those plants start to age out we may be in a position to re-evaluate nuclear energy, but I don't see it happening before then.