Over the last few months I took the time to take an intro to nuclear technology online course.
It was very enlightening.
Coursera.org
Before this course I had a fairly neutral view from off the shelf nuclear technology like Westinghouse AP1000 / Areva EPR.
I came out of the course with a even better view, with a clear understanding that the biggest problems of nuclear isn't the hard costs of building and operating a nuclear power station, instead that the real problem is only the regulatory system, political oposition and lack of proper education about radiation among the public.
Nuclear is expensive because anti nuclear forces today have a much bigger say inside the NRC than the pro nuclear ones. The NRC is running a major hatchet job on nuclear power, from within the government.
Fukushima is safe to live again, lesser risk of cancer than living in downtown Tokyo, yet, Tokyo isn't being evacuated and Fukushima still is off limits.
The Chernobyl area is filled with animal wildlife and about a thousand humans that moved back despite all the military checkpoints.
All the nuclear safety standards that make nuclear so expensive is a result of lack of low to intermediate levels of radiation hazard research. We now have that data from Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, but the NRC insists on ignoring it, taking it fully into account would result in drastic reduction is nuclear licensing/remediation/safety costs. Bottom line is if we too the current NRC regulatory framework seriously, we would need to evacuate Denver and Salt Lake City !
Hard upfront nuclear costs are lower than solar or wind (considering the added costs of peaking power plants to provide backup to solar and wind, while NEW nuclear runs 365x7 with very little maintenance stops, fully scheduled, newer nuclear plants operating for 5-15 years have achieved 97% uptime, with only fully scheduled maintenance downtimes).
Electricity generators with longtime running nuclear reactors see their nuclear assets as their cash cows, being actually cheaper than coal and natural gas to operate after 20 yrs running.
Of course, I would much rather have Molten Salt reactors running on Thorium and started up with the current spent nuclear fuel. But in the meantime, nuclear is the only electricity source that could power a fossil fuel free world today. Look no further than the essentially halted Germany renewables plan, that reduced emissions by 5% after increasing renewables share from 10% to 23%, reducing baseload nuclear and coal, but with a huge increase in fossil fuels burning for peaking powerplants.