From a Guardian article

I put the question slightly differently to Tony White, of Climate Change Capital, a London firm that analyses energy issues for businesses and organisations. Supposing I was an entrepreneur and I wanted to get into the electricity generation business in Britain. Supposing I had deep pockets for investment up front. Supposing I wanted to build something that would generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity - about as much as a medium-sized conventional or nuclear power station. Supposing I didn't care what the technology was. What would he recommend?

His answer is surprising. Not gas, not nuclear, but coal - specifically, a new type of coal power station called an IGCC, where the coal is stripped of C02, which can be sold to the offshore oil industry or “sequestered” - injected underground. “It's much cheaper to take C02 out of coal in an IGCC than out of natural gas,” he says.

Nuclear is White's second choice - a stripped-down version of the Sizewell B design. But that would only work financially if the government was prepared to underwrite the cost of the public inquiry into building it and the enormous “back-end costs” - the cost of dealing with radioactive spent fuel and decommissioning the station. Such government commitments are unlikely. With the necessary safety features, White reckons, even the capital cost of building a nuclear station in the first place would be higher than that for an IGCC. But it was the long-term concerns, rather than the up-front money, which made nuclear second-best.

When no new reactors have been built in the west for so long, too, working out how much they might cost is an inexact science. “Nobody's built one of these things in Europe for 20 years,” says Juniper. “Where are these figures coming from?” A report just out from an independent think tank, the New Economics Foundation, suggests that the costs of a new generation of reactors in Britain has been underestimated almost by a factor of three.

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