COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN THE FRACKING WARS: How The Dream Of America’s ‘Nuclear Renaissance’ Fizzled.

Building a nuclear reactor is expensive and time-consuming but once it’s up and running, it offers cheap and reliable electricity without generating the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

With encouragement from the federal government, utilities around the country began applying for permission to build new reactors. At Vogtle in Georgia and V.C. Summer in South Carolina, power companies got to work.

“I thought it was going to be a very good thing for the Southern economy,” says Marilyn Brown, a public policy professor at Georgia Tech and board member of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates three older nuclear power plants in Alabama and Tennessee.

Then there were setbacks. First came the global financial crisis, which flattened the demand for electricity. Then fracking flooded the market with cheap natural gas. Renewable energy — especially wind power — also got more competitive.

How much cheaper did renewables really get, once you factor out subsidies?