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.