The front cover is a shot of the 2.55 gigawatt Oconee plant in South Carolina. These three reactors were built for 356 million dollars between 1967 and 1974. That is $1141 per kilowatt in 2024 dollars. Oconee can produce reliable, on-demand, zero pollution, very low CO2, electricity at less than 3 cents/kWh in today’s money. These plants and their sisters have operated for over 60 years, harming exactly nobody from radiation. They are licensed to operate intothe 2050’s.

Between 1970 and 2025, technological progress should have reduced the real cost of nuclear power. Instead the current cost of nuclear plants in Europe and North America is more than $15,000/kW, more than 13 times the cost of Oconee. Thanks to its insane energy density, nuclear power should consume far less of the planet’s precious resources than any other source of electricty while producing nearly no pollution and very little CO2. Instead nuclear is a prohibitively expensive flop.

This little book explains why this auto-genocidal tragedy happened, and what we can do about it. Nuclear’s problems are entirely man-made. What is man-made can be man-unmade. If we adopt the regulatory reforms that this book lays out, the providers of nuclear power will be forced to compete with each other and new entrants on a level playing field, in which case the inherent cheapness of fission power combined with technological advances will push the cost of nuclear electricity back down to its should-cost.