According to EPRI, the correct (for them) discount rate on a nuke with respect to construction and commissioning is supposed to be 14%. Given the huge outlays of capital and the 8 to 10 year construction time period, a nuke quoted at $10.8 billion per 1200 MW capacity (expected to be around 1 GW average delivered output) gets really pricey, really fast. The recent pair of them rejected in Ontario is instructive:

http://climateprogress.org/2009/07/15/nuclear-power-plant-cost-bombshell-ontario/

But, this one may be more your style:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/01/nuclear_power.html

Nukes have been "commercial" since 1960, but 50 years later they still need extensive government subsidies. Like loan guarantees, and sticking the costs to the rate-payers years before those come on-line, virtually guaranteeing no responsibility for cost overruns. In most states, that rate-payer con is not allowed. It just got dis-allowed in Florida, so there won't be any (very aptly named) add-ons to the "Turkey Point" complex.

As to catastrophic insurance, lets says there is a Chernobyl style "oops". With damage of $1 trillion just in money damage as wide swaths or area get evacuated/degraded. Who is going to write an insurance policy that might have to pay out $1 trillion (plus also insure that  the publicly observed death by radiation poisoning of all senior level corporate officials involved, as watched on You-Tube, is carried out)? What kind of premiums do you pay when the down side is $1 trillion for a facility with a 50 year lifetime, as well as the shear impossibility and non-applicability of using Gaussian probability functions to estimate what the risk of said "oops" would be? $500 million/yr seems pretty reasonable. And what about trash disposal costs? Is it $10 million per ton of spent fuel rods? There is 16 tons/yr of that garbage that has to go somewhere. What about $25 million/ton?

All this for companies with an acute focus on meeting short term financial performance goals, and a "screw the long term aspects - just make the quarterly numbers at all cost!" mode of operation. Eventually, the wrong choice between shutting the things down for repairs/inspection versus keeping them operating will be made by the CEO's; after all, profits are only made when those systems are making electricity.

As to the Georgia location, the nuclear club in the USA is a pretty chummy one. Also very tight with what remains of our bomb making infrastructure. Georgia was picked because of the expected ease of approval - it is rabidly Rethuglican, after all. And it is home to the Savannah River nuke weapons complex. Their hope was that once the precedent has been broken (lack of new nukes in the USA), several more in other redneck states could get built. And Exelon will be angling for their sites, along with Entergy and Constellation. They would then attempt to finesse the rad waste problem later (but in reality, the nuke reactor site will be the site for permanent storage of the unwanted rad-waste).

But, it will not be enviros or peace-niks or renewable energy advocates who kill off nukes, again. It will be the bean counters - accountants. An "oops", even just a scary "near-oops", will just hasten the process. Once the economics of these financial turkeys gets exposed, it won't be pretty.

Besides, there are alternatives to nukes, including designing houses so they are not such huge electricity pigs for air conditioning. Or maybe its time to start putting a real price on big homes modeled after a New England suburban climate in the US sub-tropics, where air-conditioning allows for a "modern" skank-free way of life. August without air-conditioning in Georgia is, I am told, a religious experience, and not the heavenly kind, either. AC is one of the main drivers for electricity usage in the southern US. Maybe fewer people need to be living there... or they need to adapt to a lifestyle where dealing with the heat is done with half or a quarter of the kw-hr/yr per person as is now the case.

Nb41