The price of Nickel, a vital component of stainless steel, has risen nearly 7-fold in the last several years.  Here's a shocking chart from the London Metal Exchange.  The consequences are dramatic, since the fundamental infrastructure of the global economy is built out of that stainless steel.  Higher plant prices mean higher power prices, but also means that new coal plants will necessarily have to operate for many decades to pay back the debt costs associated with the higher capital cost investment.  Furthermore, alternative power sources, like Wind Turbines, are also made out of stainless steel and so are proposed emissions-mitigation solutions, like Carbon-Capture-and-Storage (CCS).
 
           

From the International Herald Tribune:

NEW YORK: When General Electric called in reporters for a briefing on its new nuclear partnership with Hitachi, it said that atomic power plants could be built faster than before, operated reliably and had a vanishingly small chance of an accident.

But what will they cost? After some hemming and hawing, company executives Monday gave figures by the standard industry metric, dollars per kilowatt of capacity, but in a huge range: $2,000 to $3,000.

Large foreign coal plants cost around $1,000 per kilowatt.

"There's massive inflation in copper and nickel and stainless steel and concrete," said John Krenecki, president and chief executive of GE Energy. The uncertainty is not just in nuclear plants, he said. Coal plant prices are similarly unstable.

... "There's real sticker shock out there," Randy Zwirn, president of the Siemens Power Generation Group, said in an interview. He estimated that in the past 18 months, the price of a coal-fired power plant had risen 25 percent to 30 percent.

Part of the problem is huge price increases for the raw materials that plants are made from, including copper and nickel, which is what makes steel stainless. But the cost of finishing those commodities into components is also rising.

"There's a lack of production and manufacturing facilities in this country, and that may be partly to blame," said Jason Makansi, a consultant with Pearl Street, a consulting firm in St. Louis, Missouri, that specializes in electric utilities. But, he said, "the bigger culprit is the incredible demand in China and the rest of Asia. Basically everything is being sent over that way," he said.

A result of the demand in China and India, he said, is that "Duke and others want to build a new power plant based on inexpensive coal, but the capital cost to build that plant is doubling before they even put a shovel in the ground."

Makansi and others say a result is that consumers, already paying more for electricity because the price of coal and especially natural gas is up, will pay even more for new generating stations.