Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved a new construction of a reactor for the first time in 10 years, to the Bill Gates backed Terra Power. Cool, except it's projected to cost $4 billion and the government is expected to cover half the cost, to build a reactor with 345 MW of capacity.

In contrast, solar panels cost about $1 million per MW, so an equivalent amount of peak capacity from solar would cost about $345 million, or about 1/12 the price. Solar won't run all day, but the nuclear plants will also continue to cost money to run after construction is complete.

Looking at the different LCOE estimates of each type of power generation shows that advanced nuclear is around $80/MWhr and solar+battery for all day demand tracking is about $53/MWhr.

Basically nuclear is only economically viable with government support at this point, and we should be asking whether we'd rather have the government support towards other forms of energy.