Some of the most confounding problems of our day — global warming and the West’s energy dependence on Russia and the Middle East — appear to President Barack Obama and some of Europe’s leaders to have an obvious answer: more nuclear power. A May 2014 EU Commission study on Europe’s energy security after the Ukraine crisis insists it’s going to be a big part of the solution. Nuclear is also a central component of Obama’s “all of the above” energy strategy. After all, nuclear power plants are supposedly inexpensive to run, emit no CO2 and could lessen dependence on oil and gas imports from volatile regions of the world. A no-brainer, right?

Not by a long shot. Nuclear power is a nasty red herring that advocates will pay for dearly, should it figure into their response to the current challenges on the table.

In the past, critics of nuclear power went to great lengths to point out nuclear energy’s inherent danger. Consider the meltdowns at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, they said, on top of the untold number of smaller mishaps that never make the headlines. And then there’s the unsolvable dilemma of radioactive nuclear waste, which nobody wants anywhere near their backyards.

In Europe these two strands of argument were enough to convince Danes, Italians, Austrians, the Irish and the Portuguese, among others, never to gamble with nuclear. Germany, Switzerland and Spain caught on later and are in the process of exiting nuclear power now.

But these days the safety arguments pack less punch. Not because they’re any less valid but because the costs and financial risks of building new plants are so clearly prohibitive that nuclear power doesn’t make sense even if the safety risks were zero. In a nutshell: New nuclear power doesn’t pay. In fact, it’s dramatically more expensive than the newest generations of renewables (in particular, wind and solar).

It’s the huge initial investment, the inevitable construction delays and cost overruns and poor long-term market prospects that make nuclear power such a bad deal today — and why private-sector utility companies are so hesitant to invest in new nuclear. In order to finance new reactors, countries such as the United Kingdom and Finland have called for enormous government subsidies; while this is not new (nuclear power has long been subsidized), the amounts in question today far exceed those of decades past.

There are no better examples to underscore nuclear’s dismal prospects than in Europe. Take the U.K., where the government had to backtrack on its pledge never to subsidize nuclear power. The estimated construction cost of the two planned reactors at the Hinkley Point C plant in Somerset is a mind-boggling $27 billion, which will make it the most expensive power station ever built. Once in operation, the reactors should provide about 7 percent of Britain’s electricity — which sounds enticing. But in order to make this gigantic investment attractive, the British government had to guarantee the investors, the French state-owned EDF Energy Group and two Chinese state firms, a minimum per-kilowatt price for its electricity production for 35 years. The price finally settled on was almost twice the current wholesale market price for electricity.

The outcry in the UK was deafening. Paul Dorfman of the Energy Institute at University College London underlined who would be paying these subsidies. The fixed feed-in tariff, he said “is essentially a subsidy of between what we calculate to be £800m to £1bn [$1.3 billion to 1.7 billion] a year that the U.K. taxpayer and energy consumer will be putting into the deep pockets of Chinese and French corporations, which are essentially their governments.”