Financiers don't just look at current costs, either. They look at the trajectory of costs. A nuclear power plant constructed today will be competing against renewable and storage technologies a half century or more in the future. It's a poor bet that those technologies won't be even cheaper than today, when they've been improving by an order of magnitude in cost each decade.

Any technology that predicates its economics on paying out over 40+ years doesn't make sense in an environment of rapid technoeconomic change. Renewables have accelerated the rate of change in the electrical power industry to a rate not seen since the early 20th century.