“It sometimes seems like U.S. and European nuclear companies are in competition to see which can heap greater embarrassment on their industry,” the Financial Times wrote earlier this month. This appears to be the summer that the final nails are put in the coffin of the much-overhyped U.S. nuclear renaissance. The nuclear industry is so uncompetitive now that over half of all existing U.S. nuclear power plants are “bleeding cash” according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) report released earlier this summer. BNEF found that $2.9 billion is lost every year by just 55 percent of all the nuclear plants in the United States. But, as the chart below shows, even the profitable plants have the narrowest of positive operating margins. And if existing nukes are so uneconomic, it’s no shock that new nuclear plants are completely unaffordable. The nuclear industry has priced itself out of the market for new power plants, at least in market-based economies. Even the nuclear-friendly French — who get most of their power from nukes — can’t build an affordable, on-schedule next generation nuclear plant in their own country. “Let it be written that environmentalists didn’t kill the nuclear power industry, economics did,” explains Houston Chronicle business columnist Chris Tomlinson in a piece headlined, “Nuclear power as we know it is finished.”
Think Progress 22nd Aug 2017 read more »