Nuclear power capital costs should be cheap too.

The incentives of the regulators are not aligned with the public.

Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.

They only care about reducing the risk of an accident however minor happening on their watch while not appearing to completely annihilate the technology because that would open them to political attacks.

So the balance is struck at a point where nuclear power capital costs are absurdly high.

I suspect that trying to make nuclear reactors accident proof has always been the wrong approach. Instead they should have made it so an accident could always be managed - something along the lines of if something happens drown it in concrete and forget about it, because there are 100,000 more reactors. The only safety cost would come from making a meltdown slow enough or happen in a place no one cares about for it to become a balance sheet problem.

> Regulators don't care about cheap electricity, they aren't going to get anything for that.

Of course they do. It's going to feed directly into economic growth in a way that is about as visible as a major accident multiplied by its probability

"An American Nuclear Energy Debacle"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kkgg494Ifc

It had problems well beyond the unsolved 34000 year waste stewardship costs. =3