In the document I gave you and the documents at the Vermont Law School website, there are really two key elements that turned the nuclear renaissance into a bubble. There never was a renaissance; we don't even have one picture on the wall. They really never did produce a renaissance.
Two critical factors undid the industry. One, they talked about a very low set of construction costs at the beginning. They could not deliver them by any stretch of the imagination. So it very quickly became clear that the actual projected cost of delivering them, before they started pouring concrete, which is when overruns occur, was at least three times as much as they originally talked about in the early 2000s. So the bubble came undone very quickly.
When people began to look at alternatives, while the projected cost of nuclear was increasing, the costs of the alternatives were not. Of course in the U.S. the cost of natural gas has plummeted and it looks to be very plentiful and very cheap, and the CEO of Exelon, the largest U.S. nuclear utility, has basically said nuclear can't compete. He's given big speeches and he's shown his numbers.
So it was the combination of those rising projected costs and stable alternatives. Then if you throw in the recession, which dramatically reduced demand and growth in the U.S., you really do have a perfect storm that burst the bubble long before the renaissance got going.
Frankly, you've heard the list of alternatives, although one that was not mentioned is efficiency. In my analysis that I presented to the committee I include a Wall Street analyst, because they always include efficiency; they're the only ones who do. So you've got four or five good alternatives: efficiency, wind, solar, biomass, and natural gas. Individual states and individual provinces should look at those, but they really, in my opinion, need to apply a very rigorous economic analysis.