> The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!)

So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.

This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.

You're approaching this with the nuance of a child. Yes, nuke regulation is burdensome, and yes it is necessary because nuke can have quite severe failures when failures occur. The solution is not to dogmatically suppose that one of those two basic facts is false. It's to engineer around the problem by making many exact copies of the same design, reducing the amount of regulation that needs to be applied on a per unit basis. That's what small modular reactors are. Certify once, build many.