Their economic inefficiency are mostly due to high capital costs needed to build a plant and high insurance costs. Renewables provide much greater bang for buck now, although you need to build them in the right locations that Illinois may lack (and getting transmission in from the great plains might not be viable?).
Maybe China will finally deliver some cheap reactors to work with, although I assume they are running into the same problems that we did (and corruption is a bit problematic with nuclear power plants).
Illinois already has tons of wind and just-offshore wind in the Great Lakes has a LCOE of $60/MWh which is less than half the claimed cost of new nuclear and roughly 10x less than the actual cost of recent nuclear.
I not infrequently drive between Chicago and Nashville and I'm struck by how many turbines I pass if I take a route that goes through Indiana. For whatever reason I see far fewer on the route that stays in Illinois, which isn't very far to the west.
I wonder why this might be? Just a quirk of where the highways run?
Interestingly Illinois actually doesn't have a very large coastline. Would it be sufficient for off shore wind? I guess it is convenient that Chicago is right on the lake, and the city must represent a huge percentage of Illinois power consumption.
Yes, most likely. According to this site [1][2][3], Illinois has almost double the wind generation capacity of Indiana. The average megawatts per site is almost 50% higher. Neither state holds a candle to Iowa, but again with Iowa most of those turbines aren't visible from an interstate.
EDIT - This wikipedia page [4] shows a list of large wind farms in the US. Sort it by capacity, and you'll see that the turbines you see on I-65 in Indiana are part of two adjacent farms that each are in the top 15 largest in the US and would be the second largest in the US if considered a single project.
Maybe China will finally deliver some cheap reactors to work with, although I assume they are running into the same problems that we did (and corruption is a bit problematic with nuclear power plants).