The biggest reason is cost. Building a new nuclear plant in the United States is extraordinarily expensive compared to every other way of generating electricity, and projects routinely blow past their budgets by billions of dollars. Regulatory hurdles, unresolved waste storage, and a shrinking workforce compound the problem. Public opinion, long assumed to be the main obstacle, has actually shifted in nuclear’s favor in recent years, making the financial and logistical barriers the real bottleneck.
New Nuclear Costs Far More Than Alternatives
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that an advanced nuclear plant entering service in 2030 would produce electricity at about $134 per megawatt-hour. For comparison, a natural gas combined-cycle plant comes in around $53, utility-scale solar at roughly $30, and onshore wind at about $32. Those figures already account for available tax credits. Nuclear’s price tag is more than four times that of solar and roughly two and a half times that of natural gas.
Capital costs drive most of that gap. Nuclear plants are massive concrete-and-steel structures with redundant safety systems, and they take a decade or more to design, license, and build. Unlike a solar farm, where you can install panels in phases and start generating revenue quickly, a nuclear project requires billions in upfront spending years before it produces a single watt. That means financing costs pile up, and any construction delay makes the final bill even worse.
Vogtle: A Cautionary Tale
The best illustration of why utilities are reluctant to build nuclear is Plant Vogtle in Georgia. Units 3 and 4, the first new reactors built in the U.S. in a generation, came online seven years late and $17 billion over budget. The project’s total capital and financing costs reached an estimated $31 billion. When you include costs passed on to ratepayers, the figure climbs to roughly $35.7 billion, about $20.5 billion more than originally projected.
Vogtle was supposed to prove that nuclear construction could work in the modern U.S. Instead, it reinforced the fear that haunts every utility executive considering a new reactor: you commit billions up front, and if anything goes wrong during the decade-long build, there’s no easy exit. The contractors involved went through bankruptcy. Ratepayers absorbed years of cost increases. No other utility has since broken ground on a comparable project.
Small Modular Reactors Haven’t Solved the Problem Yet
Small modular reactors were supposed to be nuclear’s answer to the cost crisis. Factory-built in standardized units, they promised shorter construction times and lower financial risk. NuScale Power’s project in Idaho was the furthest along: a partnership with a group of Utah municipal utilities to build the country’s first commercial SMR, with a target electricity price of $55 per megawatt-hour.
The project was canceled in late 2023 after costs climbed to $89 per megawatt-hour. Several utilities that had agreed to buy power from the reactors withdrew as the price rose, and NuScale couldn’t find enough subscribers to move forward. The cancellation was a significant setback for the advanced nuclear industry, because NuScale’s design was the only SMR to have received approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Other companies are still developing designs, but none has reached the construction stage.
The Regulatory and Licensing Process
Getting permission to build and operate a nuclear plant in the U.S. is one of the longest regulatory processes in any industry. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires extensive safety reviews, environmental impact assessments, and public comment periods. For a new design, the process can take a decade from initial application to operating license.
This timeline exists for good reason. A nuclear accident has consequences that a natural gas explosion or a failed wind turbine simply doesn’t. But the length and unpredictability of the process adds enormous financial risk. Every year spent waiting for approvals is a year of paying interest on borrowed capital with no revenue coming in. Utilities building solar or wind farms face nothing comparable.
No Permanent Home for Nuclear Waste
Every nuclear plant generates spent fuel rods that remain radioactive for thousands of years. The federal government was supposed to open a permanent underground repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but political opposition killed the project. Without a repository, spent fuel sits at the plant sites where it was produced, stored in pools and dry casks designed as temporary solutions.
The Department of Energy currently manages about 2,450 metric tons of spent fuel at three federal sites, with 87% of it in dry storage. Commercial plants hold their own spent fuel on-site as well. This isn’t an immediate safety crisis, as dry cask storage is considered robust, but it creates a political and financial uncertainty that makes new construction harder to justify. Every new reactor adds to a waste inventory that has no permanent destination.
A Shrinking Pipeline of Workers
Building and operating nuclear plants requires a specialized workforce: nuclear engineers, reactor operators, health physicists, welders certified for nuclear-grade work. The pipeline has been thinning. In 2022, U.S. universities awarded 454 bachelor’s degrees in nuclear engineering, nearly 27% fewer than the levels reported from 2016 through 2019. That number is roughly on par with what universities produced back in 2010.
Ph.D. production has actually hit record highs, with 211 awarded in 2022, the most since tracking began in 1966. But research expertise alone doesn’t build power plants. The hands-on construction and operations workforce shrank as existing plants closed and no new ones were being built, creating a skills gap that contributed to the delays at Vogtle. Rebuilding that workforce would take years, and workers won’t specialize in nuclear careers without confidence that projects will actually get built.
Public Opinion Is No Longer the Main Barrier
For decades, opposition to nuclear power was strong enough to make it politically toxic. The accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima each drove support downward. But public sentiment has shifted substantially. A 2025 Gallup poll found 61% of Americans favor using nuclear energy, just one point below the all-time high of 62% recorded in 2010. Opposition dropped to 35%. That’s a dramatic reversal from 2016, when support hit a low of 44% and a majority opposed nuclear power.
Growing concern about climate change is a major driver. Nuclear plants produce no carbon emissions during operation, and they generate electricity around the clock regardless of weather, something solar and wind can’t do. Tech companies hungry for reliable, carbon-free power to run data centers have publicly explored nuclear options. The political landscape has shifted too: nuclear now draws support from both sides of the aisle, though for different reasons.
Federal Incentives Are Growing
The federal government has been trying to tip the economics in nuclear’s favor. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, new zero-carbon power plants entering service in 2025 or later can claim either a production tax credit of $25 per megawatt-hour for the first 10 years of operation or a 30% investment tax credit on construction costs. Plants built on former fossil fuel sites or in energy communities get a 10% bonus on top of that.
These credits help, but they haven’t been enough to close the gap. Even with tax credits factored in, the EIA’s cost estimates still put nuclear at more than double the price of natural gas and more than four times solar. The credits reduce risk for developers, but they don’t solve the fundamental problem: nuclear plants cost too much to build and take too long to finish, and cheaper alternatives keep getting cheaper.
The Core Dilemma
The U.S. isn’t building more nuclear plants because the economics don’t work in a market where solar, wind, and natural gas are all dramatically cheaper and faster to deploy. The country has the technical knowledge, growing public support, and federal incentives in place. What it doesn’t have is a way to build reactors on time and on budget. Until someone demonstrates that a nuclear project can be completed without doubling in cost and taking a decade longer than planned, utilities will keep choosing the alternatives that don’t carry that risk.