If you read the literature analysing historic nuclear costs around the world, this just isn't true. Nuclear reactors are complex 'mega-projects' requiring coordination across a vast number of actors, specialist work under the constraints of a construction sites, and which - because of lower numbers of reactors, changing and adapted design, diffuse consortia - have failed to push down costs through learning-by-doing. A study just over a decade ago found that ~98% of nuclear projects involve schedule overruns. Because nuclear projects involve extreme capital costs, this means: (i) vast sums have to be paid in interest over the build time; (ii) states/taxpayers/consumers usually bear some of the risk.

Compare a nuclear project to a solar panel. Solar is cheap, simple, commoditised, flexible, and is riding on almost miraculous learning curves. If dispatchable energy can be solved, beyond just gas/coal plants, ideally with long-duration storage based on the conversion of electricity, then this is going to be an infinitely better option. It's also just not clear what role nuclear plants have given that renewables need highly dispatchable power to ramp up and down according to their variable output, not baseload nuclear power.

> It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating

Is there a study that identifies which regulations are unnecessary and how much removing them would save?

> It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.

This is an oft repeated point by pro nuclear folk, but it’s not true. There are many regulatory regimes all over the world, and new nuclear is competitive in effectively none of them. Even in single party state china with few regulations , nukes are a declining share of total power every year.

They’re just giant big complex pieces of machinery. With huge ongoing security, insurance and deferred decommissioning costs.

> Nuclear isn't uncompetitive due to some inherent technological reason. It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.

That's the go-to nuclear apologist argument, but it doesn't hold water. Nuclear is struggling globally, even in China. That points to inherent problems. Regulation also doesn't explain why costs have been so widely underestimated. That's a function of dishonesty of the cost projections, not of regulation.

I'll add that regulation is the price you pay for implicit subsidy like government insurance against accidents. You don't get the latter without the former.

Germany has been spending a lot recently to build new power generation. Of course it’s expensive.

France is now on ancient fully depreciated nuclear reactors that are soon in dire need of replacement. Of course it’s cheap. But they have huge investments ahead of them to replace, upgrade, refurbish, etc. They have identified that that need to expand renewable energy to 50% of power generation, at least.

We’ve also seen recently that Germany has had to save France during hot summers when their reactors have had to shut down.

What’s the lesson from France? Build lots of nuclear all at once many decades ago when labor was cheap and then stop investing and letting your infrastructure rot, and you’ll have cheap power for some limited time? Is that something anyone can or should copy today? No.

Now, even VALCOE (value-adjusted LCOE) of wind and solar is coming down well below all other fossil and nuclear alternatives. So how can you say betting on renewables was the wrong at this time? It has been expensive to transition but long term it’s drastically cheaper than everything else. And we haven’t even started getting the benefits of how repowering old renewable power plants is significantly cheaper than building new ones.

You're reading from the playbook of bad nuclear bro arguments.

The implication you're trying to draw there is a non sequitur. That situation doesn't contradict what I said. Moreover, France is going to be dragged kicking and screaming into the renewable age because they can't afford to subsidize nuclear builds enough to make a nuclear approach work.