“That is an $18 TRILLION investment.”
Can you give a comparative cost? You say Vogtle 3 & 4 cost about 13.6 billion per gigawatt, which is about 13.6 dollars per watt.
Is that high? An engineer told me that for nuclear plant, fuel costs are small compared to interest on the borrowed money to build it, and operation/maintenance/depreciation costs.
A comparison of total lifetime cost per kilowatt hour, nuclear versus natural gas or coal, would be interesting.
I’ve lived long enough to remember when environmentalists hated nuclear power.
The Lazard chart at the Wiki page of LCOE is deceptive for wind and solar because it does not account for intermittency and does not include the full system needed to make the power “dispatchable,” i.e., you can ramp it up and down to match demand. This has been an egregious BIG LIE about renewables the past 30 years.
You make coal plants dispatchable by keeping a 90 day supply of coal on the ground at the plant to buffer delivery problems (typical in winter) and labor stoppages. There is no practical, reliable, low cost or feasible way to store power generated by wind and solar.