Every nuclear explosion since 1945

[Anomalocaris]

The Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's main trade organization, ranks current nuclear plants as the cheapest source of U.S. electricity, with operating, maintenance and fuel costs of just over 2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2009, compared to 5 cents for electricity from natural gas-fired plants and 3 cents for coal generation. Exelon said its generating plants returned average margins of 3.76 cents per kilowatt-hour last year, despite lower power prices, and two-thirds of Exelon's overall generation capacity comes from nuclear plants.

"These [nuclear] plants, which are fully depreciated, were purchased at a discount and are, in fact, cash cows," said industry critic Mark Cooper, a senior fellow at Vermont Law School's Institute for Energy and the Environment.

That is meant to misinform. The operative word in the entire passage is "fully depreciated". In other words, during the nuclear doldrums of 1990s, the utilities that own nuclear plants used accounting tricks to effectively write off the initial construction cost of those plants, while at the same time convincing many public utility commissions to raise electric rates to compensate them for the "loss". This is what is meant by these plants being "fully depreciated". These plants on carried on their books as having fully paid off initial construction cost using funds that were gleamed from the general electric rate, not their specific power sales. So by this accounting trick, nuclear plants only had to pay their fuel and operating cost, and no longer has to keep paying back loans on their construction cost.

Hence they look so good.

If they must honestly repay their original construction cost, which per MW of capacity or total MWh of energy is amongst the most expensive of any large scale power source, their overall economics looks worse by some margin and is hopeless compare to natural gas fired power plants at current gas prices.