Ironically, it's wind and solar that finished off nuclear power. Renewable energy has high variability in supply, but sells power at zero marginal cost. That means grid demand becomes highly variable during the day.
Nuclear (and coal) are both systems with high capital costs and very low marginal cost. To be cost competitive, they both need to produce power 90%+ of the time to amortize the initial capital. However, with the current variability in demand, they can't get anywhere close to 90% demand from the grid.
This leaves a market opening for peaker plants with very low capital costs, notably natural gas and hydro in the US. Hydro is saturated, and combined with low-cost fuel due to the fracking boom, natural gas is exploding.
Basically, the net result of wind/solar is actually a wash, from an environmental standpoint. That will get better with HVDC interconnects (reduces variability of wind), but in general it is not happy outcome.
Even if you relaxed the safety regulations, natural gas has an edge with fracking.
I think most of the market burden stems from the regulatory delay and uncertainty. That delay and uncertainty makes it impossible to quickly build plants, regardless of how stringent the engineering specifications. And if you can't quickly build one plant, you can't quickly build ten of them, and you lose the expertise and proficiency needed to build them cost-effectively.
I remember reading an article about the South Korean nuclear industry. At their peak they could build a nuclear power plant quickly, on time, and on budget. Presumably these plants adhered to Western standards. Repetition built project management proficiency and a skilled, specialized workforce.
Ultimately I don't blame the regulatory agencies, per se. I blame the mandate they've been given by a very fearful population. Industry doesn't know what will pass regulatory muster because the regulators are winging it because the public makes safety demands completely divorced from concrete science and engineering.
My takeaway is that if you're going to regulate, you better be darned sure what, why, and how you're going to regulate. If you (i.e. Joe Public, Senator Smith) can't answer those questions, then regulation will prove disastrous. If you can answer those questions well than the true regulatory burden will quickly become apparent and industry will adjust accordingly or exit, without all the confusion, bickering, and wasted resources.
It's like with GMOs: people against GMOs (or proposing strong oversight) can't articulate well why, how, or precisely which aspects of the industry they want to regulate. Which makes it easy for me to vote against propositions purporting to regulate the industry. A poorly articulated solution is no solution at all, and a poorly articulated problem is strong evidence there may not be any problem.
Other problem is the long construction times. As the planning and construction time becomes a larger fraction of the payback time, the economics gets increasing bad. That's a problem for nuclear plants with 10-15 year construction time lines and 30 year payback. Compare with nat gas or solar plants with 2-5 year build outs. Worse nat gas plays back in 5-10 years.
And if their nuclear ambitions, in the end, didn't come to a whole lot more than ours did... well, why not? It wasn't "regulation", so there must be other structural factors at work, which may or may not be the same as ours.
They have not gone all in on nuclear and are exploring as many alternatives to coal as they can.
Why does it suggest that?
China has only been seriously trying to cut back on coal for ~10 years.
All it shows is that coal is cheaper than nuclear and that to a rapidly industrializing country cheap is more important than environmentally friendly.
On the other hand the US is shutting down plants and decreasing overall capacity.
China, as you observed, has no qualms about "environmentally friendly", so according to America's nuclear proponents, China should have more nuclear than us, not less, since it's cheaper. This is not the case, ergo their argument is flawed.
Your argument doesn't really make sense.
Nobody is arguing that nuclear is cheaper than dirty coal.
Proponents argue that it's cheap and orders of magnitude more environmentally friendly than burning dirty coal.
China is still very price conscious and are building out nuclear in an effort to reduce pollution - proving that the Chinese do believe nuclear can be done cheaply and safely.
With electricity, peak demand is king. It doesn’t make sense to build a billion dollar nuclear plant that isn’t needed except for August.
As it stands coal stations produce more nuclear waste than nuclear power plants https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
Nuclear seems to be one of those incredibly capital intensive projects where scale is king. If you could build one site as big as you wanted, wherever you wanted, that could sell every watt of power anywhere in the country- maybe that works a lot better for nuclear.
LFTR reactors, if they actually had significant economic potential, wouldn't need incentives. India or China would have gone all-out on them, but the fact is they still require Uranium to get started, and even in theory they aren't much better than what we're currently using for fission-based power.
Ignoring both coal and nuclear is pretty much inevitable, as long as natural gas and renewables stay this cheap or cheaper.
There is considerably less ore mining and refining involved in nuclear compared to renewable, due to the orders of magnitude higher energy density.
It's fallacious reasoning, because by that standard, NOTHING produced by the current society is zero carbon. Nuclear itself is zero carbon, just like wind or solar. But all three require material that could conceivably be produced in a zero carbon / 100% offset regimen. So the correct approach is to push for zero carbon transport, zero carbon cement etc. Or just tax the carbon to get it to a planetary safe level and let the market allocate.
Natural gas will be an integral of the energy mix for the next 50 years at least.