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Comment by windlep | Hacker News Reader

If we ignore waste for a minute, this article highlights a key issue for why nuclear in the USA will never be as cheap as France or South Korea. Those countries can impose a single builder, single supplier requirement and enforce it the whole way through. That'd never happen here, everyone would have to get involved. Blame cronyism and the US lobbyist political system, but every nuclear company would freak out if they weren't the chosen provider, and then they'd sue.... and then it'd be as expensive as it is now.

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Another difference is the legal regime. The U.S. makes much more extensive use of the courts as a tool for balancing interests, and an indirect way of regulating industries, which makes projects much slower, riskier, and more expensive.

In a country like France, you can't normally sue to stop a nuclear plant being built. Once the government decides to build it, they have sovereign immunity from suits in their own courts. So if you don't want it, you can agitate for the government to stop it, but you can't sue the project to stop it (or at least, there are many fewer ways to do so). The U.S. by contrast has waived its own sovereign immunity in a lot of cases, setting up a more decentralized decision-making process where the legislature passes general laws, agencies like the DOE and EPA are delegated rule-making authority, and courts then adjudicate disputes. The multiple levels of government (federal agencies, state agencies, federal courts, state courts) add another complication.

Little known fact: the legal regime in the US shields the utility from liability in case of accident. Recall the utility wasn't sued after Three Mile Island.

If utilities were made liable for harm for nuclear disasters, how long do you suppose it would be before every last one was decommissioned? I suspect all the cost savings TFA hopefully imagines vanish in comparison to the cost of liability.

I also note TFA makes no attempt to express the South Korean costs in USD terms. It wouldn't surprise me, given the state of South Korea's economic development in 1971, if what the graph depicts is not a miraculous decline in costs, but a predictable trend toward the global norm.

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