Natural gas may be cheap right now, but pound for pound you can get an order of magnitude more energy from a pound of uranium than a pound of natural gas.
You sir are 100% correct. A better question is why nuclear is so much more expensive than conventional power plants. The answer is simple, it is government micro managing the industry and the environmentalists multiple law suits against that source of energy. Therefore, a very cheap source of energy has become very expensive. Government regulation does not REPEAT DOES NOT insure safety. A case in point is the recent disaster in Japan. This was not an engineering problem but it was an economic expediency that fostered poor engineering of their plants. In effect the nuclear power plants did not have fail safe passive system to keep the reactor cores from reaching a melt down temperature. The tsunami rendered the primary coolant systems inoperable. The tsunami did not cause the "sub standard piss poor design engineering of the plants."
What is the answer to this problem. The answer is the concept of absolute liability. Any provider of nuclear energy must have absolute liability for any accidents via outside insurance. There is no one, not anybody tougher than the bean counters in the back room of an insurance company. If the bean counters say it is okay to insure this plant, it is safe. If they do not insure it, it does not get built.
Relative to the total assets of an insurance being able to insure the total costs of a disaster, if they can not insure and compensate for the worst case disaster it would be required that the risks be shared by multiple insurance groups (That is how Lloyds of London works).
If the proposed plant is unable to buy the insurance necessary, the nuclear plant should not be built. If they can obtain insurance, rest assured that it is safe.
Insurance companies do not like losing money!!!!
Six orders of magnitude would be a better estimate.