I have no idea who Steve Thomas is, nor do I really care.   Many people are wrong about this subject.

According to the Tarjenne study, nuclear power is the most competitive choice for Sweden.

I note that the grand renewable future has been under discussion since the early 1970's and still has not produced 5 exajoules of primary energy on the entire planet as a whole.   So if long time periods are critical issues, we should immediately give up on renewable energy on the grounds that it is a failure.

The ground breaking on the EPR in Finland.

I don't know how addition and subtraction is done in Europe, but the plant was ordered in 2003, and thus if it comes on line in 2010, that will be 7 years and not 13.

Each subsequent reactor may take far less time as procedures are streamlined.

Finally this plant is subject to FOAKE (First of a Kind Engineering) delays.   These are hardly catastrophic, certainly not as catastrophic as the German failure to address the growth in their energy consumption by posturing mindlessly about wind and solar power.

 France's EdF can write off losses to consumers while in Finland the shareholders are the major consumers.

EDF is the most profitable company in France (it has had a bigger operating profit than Total, the oil company, for the past two years, despite the fact that its turnover is less thna half Total's). That reflects the fact that its production costs are the lowest, by far, in Europe.

And not that this is not the reuslt of past subsidies. EDF has been paying money to the French government for the past 25 years, not the other way around. And French electricity prices are the lowest in Europe (escept for a couple of Scandinavian countries that have access to plenty of hydro power).

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes