If you want a glimpse of the fantasy land that the nuclear industry lives in, you couldn’t do better than take a look at what’s going on in Turkey right now.

After three previous attempts had to be abandoned, the latest process to commission and build the country’s first nuclear power plant descended into farce almost from the outset and hasn’t improved since. After 13 companies expressed an interest in the project, in the end just one – a consortium led by Russia’s state-run Atomstroyexport – bid in the contract tendering process.

Despite this putting the tender in contravention of Turkey’s competition laws and the country’s nuclear strategy being fraught with problems and dangers, the government has decided to press ahead.

And this is where things take a turn for the ludicrous. Today, the bidding consortium announced how much the electricity produced by the new plant would cost: 21 cents per kilowatt hour. That’s three times the current average price of electricity in Turkey. Electricity would have to triple in price before the reactor became economically viable.

This would make Turkey’s reactor the most expensive electricity generating power plant in the world.. Wind power by comparison is currently generating electricity at one third of this offer.You really have to wonder what was going through the consortium representative’s minds when they wrote down the 21 cent figure. We’d have paid good money to see the looks on the government officials’ faces when they opened the envelope.

So much for nuclear’s promise of cheap electricity. Do you know they once said nuclear energy would be too cheap to be metered? Stop laughing, it’s true.