That's fair. But what about South Korea, China, India, Turkey?
In China you can't probably trust the official cost numbers (I'm not even trying to google for them). But you can't deny the astonishing pace they've built in the last decade: in 2012 they had 12 GW of nuclear capacity, in 2022 this went to 52 GW. 40 GW in one decade. France built 41 GW of capacity between 1980 and 1990, and the US 44 GW between 1970 and 1980, so this is not unprecedented, but it'd darn impressive in post-Fukushima era.
Those countries have costs of labor far far below Western countries. There are also huge questions about corruption and actual work performed. For example, Sourh Korea, the least corrupt country there with the highest cost of labor, put executives in jail for their fraud on safety certifications.
My personal hypothesis is that nuclear is only kind of affordable for a very narrow band of technological advancement, where labor is still cheap enough but tech capability has not advanced too much. After your technological capacities advance far enough, labor is better spent on other tech than building massive cathedrals.
As for China, try comparing nuclear builds to a single quarter of solar or storage output. It's a big country, and China's investment in nuclear is proof that even in a country known for excellent skills in managing massive construction projects, it's not really giving renewables a run for their money.
> Those countries have costs of labor far far below Western countries
That could be for some labor, but not all. The US is still in the game when it comes to automobiles. Well, when it comes to Tesla, it looks to me Tesla is eating everyone's lunch. The US is still in the game for other very high tech things, like military hardware. Or industrial trucks (think Caterpillar).
Where the US and other Western nations are a bit hopeless is the costs of megaconstructions, be they nuclear power plant or high speed rail, or simply skyscrapers.
But nuclear power plants could be more like Caterpillar than like "massive cathedrals", as you call them.
Similar regulatory regimes started by the same groups of people, which work in similar ways? AKA think of every possible thing that could go wrong and mandates designs with have engineering margins far in excess of what the a reasonable analysis of the risks/etc would call for.
We could do similar things to renewables by simply mandating that they have carbon free backup sources sufficient to guarantee four of five nines of reliability.
So you think this is a realistic possibility for France, a nation that loves nuclear?
Have any evidence of these regulations? What regulations can we change?
I've looked and looked and never found somebody saying "these regulations are unnecessary" but it's trivial to find examples of management not taking the regulations seriously and then paying for it when they cut corners (basically all the welding for the AP1000s in Georgia and South Carolina).
It's also easy to find management errors that ballon costs and cause massive delays.
I'm completely unconvinced that we can pin this on the NRC.
If you look at the cost overruns in GA quite a number of people have come out and said that no one wants to criticize the NRC, seemingly because they can make your life hell.
And change orders, and the like were listed as one of the reasons for the overruns, how much of that do you think is some engineer who designed the plant waking up one day and deciding something needs to be changed, or is it a case of the NRC nitpicking everything, and just loading the whole process up with so much paperwork that everyone is frozen, and any little mistake in the paperwork ends up costing the project. Sure blame the plant mgmt for not having the correct paperwork and delaying the start by 6 months, but who is asking for that paperwork to begin with? A lot of it sounds like a game of gocha, create a problem so complex that its nearly unsolvable and most of the work isn't even welding pipes but putting a thousand people in the chain, everyone of which can stop the line at any time, largely with no repercussions.
Sure, contractors mess up, but most contracts are written so that its the contractor who pays for it, not the organization hiring the contractor. So, again, contractor messes up, comes up with a workable mitigation/rework plan, but you sit there for 6+ months arguing about whether its allowed.
I've seen first hand the mess of regulation related paperwork it takes to run a normal NG/etc plant, it takes teams to of people to review it every year and assure compliance. Layering the NRC/etc into this is how you end up spending insane amount of capital and producing nothing but paperwork (see nuscale) on a design that isn't particularly ground breaking in the face of existing plants. I can't even imagine how much it would take to certify something like a navy reactor in that kind of environment.
None of the exposed I have seen mention anything about NRC specific regulations. It's just bad management processes dictating sloppy first attempts at design, leading to literally unconstructable designs, followed by even worse management processes for getting feedback and changes, or any sort of streamlining to allow agile response.
Imagine a huge waterfall design, with the architects being part of a completely different company than the implementers, and months long turn around to get clarification on any aspect or to get the designers to sign off on the necessary changes for anything to happen.
People are not afraid to criticize the NRC, it falls out of people's mouth so easily. But if they are actually afraid of the NRC, why are they so willing to provide critique, but unwilling to suggest the exact things that are the problem?
More likely you have a bunch of substandard folks unwilling to take any sort of responsibility for their actions or for management and instead blame a third party.
Suppose that any one of these companies spent a tiny tiny fraction of their money of proposing changes to regulations that would allow them to build effectively? Why don't we see any sort of proposals like that?
As for nuscale, this is a perfect example of using the NRC as a scapegoat and being unwilling to look at the true source of their problems:
I am still waiting for some sort of example of the NRC layering on something unnecessary, after six years of begging people making the claim to produce one shred of evidence.
I don't think we can blame the NRC for this. There's something deeper.