Factor in all the externalities that these other forms of energy bring in and nuclear is probably one of the cheapest. If you could put a figure on the economic damage from an entire city of millions breathing in fumes from pollutants every day on their lives, it would probably be astronomical.

> Factor in all the externalities that these other forms of energy bring in and nuclear is probably one of the cheapest.

There's a lot of handwaving in that personal assertion. The fact is that nuclear is by far more expensive than any alternative source of energy, baseless assertions on how with some imagination you can inflate cost of alternatives does nothing to change that.

Its not imagination, you can quantify these things. There have been thousands of studies showing the economic damage of something like a polluting coal plant and its not like we pass these costs on to the polluter ever, so of course the price of a coal plant looks low when you ignore the hospital bills and the loss of biodiversity. I'm not going to do your book report for you though.

Were those comparisons made with current prices for natural gas? Probably not.

Probably not, but the gas price is peaking for several, mostly temporal reasons. Especially if the overall gas usage drops due to more renewable electricity, the gas price will drop also.

But the real competition for nuclear energy shouldn't be gas (which is expensive even in better times), but renewables. We need much more of them.

Winter is yet ahead, in the coming 6 months gas usage is only going to increase, so I don't think that this peak will decrease any time soon.

When we talk about possible new nuclear plans, we are not talking about the next months but years. Short term not much can rectify the situation other than trying to buy more gas. Ironically, the much criticized north stream 2 pipeline has just become ready to put into operation.

Prices now are largely based on projections for winter.

Even at current NG prices in Europe, combined cycle is still probably cheaper than new nuclear.

Only in the west. In Korea it’s about the same price as other clean energy forms.

I'd happily pay the price for nuclear in exchange for it's cleanness.

Assuming that's true so what? Do we have any other choice? What other low carbon options do we have? Germany already has enough wind and solar that it's causing issues on bad weather days. Battery technology needs another decade or two the bare minimum to get close to being viable.

It was the cheapest just 10 years ago.

That’s only when you compare the levelized costs of electricity and ignore the huge system costs of volatile renewables.

You don’t gain anything from cheap wind power if it’s not available when you actually need it.