> overregulation.

Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse).

Some things needs to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet.

So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.

Nuclear is expensive because of the large amount of high-skill labor, including welding, that's required. For less economically advanced countries, that labor is cheap. For more economically advanced countries, that labor becomes more expensive. Regulation is a red-herring being pushed as an excuse, mostly by startups that are desperate to get the next round of funding, because it plays very well to the investor class, but it's not based in reality. I ask about this all the time and even if there are some half-baked critiques of things like ALARA, nobody has a path to actually making the Nth build of a reactor cheaper from changing regulations.

Even France, which is known for having far lower construction costs than the US on big projects, and for being very good at building out their nuclear fleet in the past, is at ~$12/W with their newest round of 6 reactors. And that's before they have even started construction:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-estimate...

This is roughly the cost of the latest US nuclear reactor at Vogtle, which is viewed as unrealistically expensive energy.

And even the most optimistic plans for reducing the cost of nuclear from the Liftoff report in 2023 from DOE doesn't place regulations as having much of a role in lowering costs:

https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-...

There's significant political interest in having regulation be the reason that nuclear is expensive, but I find almost zero people in the nuclear industry that are able to articulate where regulations increase the cost of builds or whether there's anything that could or should be changed about the regulations.

Grid forming inverters for providing virtual inertia are only going to get better and better, there's no reason that as those control systems improve why synthetic inertia won't be able to be basically identical to real spinning mass. In the meantime while that technology matures, synchronous condensers can provide grid inertia without needing nuclear or coal, we already have about four in Australia supporting our grid and will probably have another dozen or so built over the next decade or two.

Nuclear is inherently expensive even with zero regulations you have the full costs of a coal power plant + more expensive lifetime costs for fuel + extra costs associated with nuclear such as more and more highly educated workers.

Meanwhile coal is dead because it’s already more expensive than the market is willing to accept.

The only hope for nuclear is massive subsidies, deregulation on its own isn’t going to work.

Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

It's not just a matter of "overregulation". ALARA, aka As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable is an explicit goal of nuclear regulation.

Or maybe it's expensive because it doesn't scale. The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them. And if we /do/ hit economies of scale, uranium availability is likely to become a problem...

I suspect geothermal is going to quickly replace Nuclear as the most viable option for base load stabilization. Tech has come a long way towards letting us access it away from hot zones and it uses a lot of the same infrastructure and expertise that the oil industry has already developed.

You sound like you know a lot, I’m curious if there’s a case to be made that instead of batteries that take a ton of minerals and need to be replaced, instead using the excess energy to store energy by e.g. pumping water to higher altitudes and letting it generate electricity on the way down later when needed.

Or possibly under regulated. Where exactly is all the radioactive waste going to go? Especially the spent fuel rods pose major disposal challenges. The one site that was looking hopeful appears to have been discarded. It is a bit late in the game to be pending basic stuff that is piling up. Most nuclear power plants are not well sited for long term disposal, though that is what is happening.

Is there a comparison of how much nuclear costs versus the number of cities destroyed per year? Say, if we allow 1 meltdown per year does it become comparable to solar or does it require 10 meltdowns per year?

>Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

Would to prefer underregulating it?

How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?

nuclear also has a very limited lifespan if we go all-in on it. we will run out.