There are 4 carbon neutral power sources: solar, wind, hydro and nuclear.
All 4 require 100% of the building cost upfront. While a natural gas plant is 20% upfront and 80% over time.
Borrowing all that money upfront means it will always cost from day one.
The Koreans can build new reactors for $1700kw with a LCOE lower than natural gas at $5 MMbtu a price Korea will never see again for LNG they must import every cubic foot of natural gas. Korea also repossess their spent fuel they proved it’s 5 hundreds of a cent difference in fuel cycle cost vs direct disposal and it cuts the waste volumes to 35% of the original and the HLW is in a ceramic dense format perfect for deep borehole disposal in geologically stable formations which they are doing in 500 meters of solid granite.
They have the fuel.costs of once through at 6.3 mils per kWh vs 6.7 with reprocessing one mil is one thousandth of a U.S. dollar that’s 0.63 cents per kWh vs 0.67 with reprocessing nuclear fuel is already the cheapest form of fuel on a but for bud basis in the world. $0.60 cents for a million btus or less in some places. For an extra 5 hundredths of a cent per kWh they sit the volume of wastes and turn it into ceramic glass that’s stable for Geological timescales solving the “waste” issue which has again always been a political issue not a technical one.
https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/521381
They also raised prices on coal. For the Koreans nuclear is the cheapest power source.
Why? Because they standardized and approved a design then built it again and again while not allowing antinuke zealots to use lawfare to stall construction with endless lawsuits. The reason nuclear plants are so capital intensive here is due to lawfare it’s a political problem not a technical one.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516300106