Why is nuclear power so expensive?

Nuclear is capital-heavy and fuel-light — most of the cost is building the plant, and once it's built it produces some of the cheapest, most reliable electricity on the grid for 60–80 years. That's a fantastic asset; the challenge is purely the up-front build.

And that challenge is increasingly looking solvable rather than inherent (we label the optimistic reading contested in fairness). The big cost drivers — first-of-a-kind engineering, lost construction experience, and regulatory churn — are fixable with repetition and reform. Where countries build reactors in series, like South Korea, costs come down sharply. Nuclear isn't expensive by nature; it's expensive when we build it rarely.