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Originally Posted by Superbelt
Nuke plants in North America particularly have been notoriously expensive and have overruns because each plant gets designed almost from the ground up, on an individual basis.
France picked one design and built it everywhere for decades at a time, vastly lowering the cost.
They also had a centralized fuel and waste depot as well as a school for nuclear engineers etc.
That is what you get with a nationalized nuclear grid that supplies over 75% of the countries power.
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France's nuclear program was a knee-jerk reaction to oil price spikes in the '70s. They now face the challenges of dealing with all the waste products they're producing from all those plants. This requires developing deep mines for storage that will happen over thousands of years.
I would like to look more into this, but I've initially uncovered an article that suggests that wind power is actually on par with nuclear in terms of cost, and in some cases, it's less expensive. Even the nuclear industry has admitted as much.
When you consider the initial costs, operation costs, and disposal costs, nuclear energy perhaps isn't as cheap as it may seem.
Check it out.