On Sept. 16, 1954, in a speech to a group of science writers, Adm. Lewis L. Strauss, then head of the agency now known as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, made a bold prediction. The potential for peaceful uses of nuclear energy was so great, he said, that electricity produced by nuclear power plants would one day be ‘too cheap to meter.’ Over the coming decades, the economics of nuclear power turned out to be more problematic. Even before operational catastrophes at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Ukraine, the industry was reeling from a series of financial catastrophes that brought widespread project cancellations and effectively ended construction of new plants in the U.S. Now, nearly three decades after the last new plant was approved, proponents of nuclear power say the economics of atom-splitting energy have dramatically improved. In fact, they argue, financial forces have become a driving force behind a new enthusiasm for nuclear energy as the power industry scrambles to meet growing demand for electricity with an aging fleet of generating stations. But the industry still needs to raise tens of billions of dollars before the proposed round of […]