> Nuclear is extremely expensive
Nuclear compliance and certification is extremely expensive. The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.
The largest cost associated with a new nuclear plant are the interest payments given that a plant may need to spend 10+ years sitting idle before it can be activated.
What, we should have a wild west where everyone can set up their own nuclear power station without any compliance or certification? If not then these are part of the build cost... it's like saying we shouldn't include testing as part of the cost of building software.
> compliance and certification
You can say the same for cars, houses, appliances, medical devices, elevators, stairs, disabled access, etc etc.
So, what exactly is your point? Yes, everything would be "much cheaper" if nobody had to pay as much attention to most details any more. Everything would also be much much more expensive for everybody else and longer term, or not work at all or reliably or safely.
It's a question of magnitude. Do you think that over-regulation of specific technologies is possible?
If the price of building stairs was growing each year in only the west to the point were we were opening one staircase 5 every years, it might be worth to ask some companies why. If they all say "the last guy who built stairs got bogged down for 25 years trying to meet all the safety standards". It might be time to relax some of them.
If this were true china wouldnt be winding down its nuclear program in favor of solar and hydro
They're not winding down per say, nuclear has stayed steady, renewables simply exploded. Nuclear understandably more prone to schedule delays, but now it's mostly execution delays in months vs regulatory delays in years. They're still on trend with nuclear year plans. Solar simply scales much faster because all the displaced construction worker from real estate slow down can slap panels but not reactors.
> The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.
That is not at all what I have seen, the costs tend to be from absolutely massive infrastructure needed to last a long time in harsh conditions that are difficult to repair.
Those seem more like fundamental engineering requirements.
Across four different regulatory structures: France, Finland, the UK, and the US, modern nuclear has proven to be excessively expensive and require massive amounts of high skilled labor. In the past century, high skilled labor was cheaper, but these days we need to pay welders and other construction workers higher wages because they have high productivity alternative jobs that pay better than in 1970.
Those high interest payments for 10+ years are also because EPC promises to build the design within 5-7 years then takes 2-3x the time. At Vogtle the fuckups both on design meant that many plans were "unconstructable" and then construction proceeded anyway with whatever they could wing together then they had to go back and make sure that whatever the bell was built still met the design.