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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

Price probably played a pretty big role, too. The up front cost of a new nuclear plant is eye watering. Hard to compete against solar & battery these days which can be spun up in months and cost comparatively pennies.

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That's also true, partially driven by a lot of hurdles and time spent fighting for approval due to the anti-nuclear push due to the things I mentioned, but it is also just expensive to build in the US because our labor and land is pretty expensive too.

I mean concrete is also just really expensive. A lot of the cost is labor, yes, but still.

Is there a study that pinpoints which nuclear regulations are unnecessary and how much they add to the LCoE of a nuke plant?

I'm thinking more of the cycles of community approval that can drag on and delay the project rather than individual ongoing regulations.

Why are these rounds of community consultation allowed? Surely legislatures ought to be able to pre-empt them.

Disallow community input just for building nuclear in a community, or also disallow community input for all public and private zoning, and infrastructure proposals, transit proposals, etc?

Disallow community input for anything not meeting some emissions (noise, smell, light, whatever) at the property line criteria.

For industrial sites (including nuclear) there should have to be some sort of containment requirements or insurance/bonds for cleanup but if those can be met I don't see why it should matter any more than a soda bottling plant.

Nukes are ruinously expensive all over the world. This isn’t a US thing, or a “darn regulations slowing us down” thing. Nukes are just too expensive, regardless of regulatory regime.

And the price was escalating even before TMI and Chernobyl.

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