If there is one good thing the admin might actually do, it's gut the incredibly suffocating regulations on nuclear.
Nuclear is only a fraction as expensive as the regulations around it. My company has a division that deals with the nuclear industry, and I really cannot overstate how incredibly intense they are.
Imagine your company issued laptops and required 14 different "live scanner" security apps running with twice daily full system scans. Now be a productive dev on that system. Would you be surprised if every project runs far over budget and far over timeline?
Vogtle is bad example. It was the first of its kind after a long stagnation of nuclear builds (US no longer has the ability to build and operate new nuclear) - that and the regulatory/licensing costs blew through the roof.
Vogtle is the wake-up call needed to get nuclear manufacturing/talent going again. I hear you but I think you are taking the wrong lesson.
I will add -- if indeed prices stay at Vogtle then yes Nuclear is dead. That said there's no way thats the new pricing going forward.
Vogtle is an excellent example - it literally had a negative learning rate from construction of reactor 3 to reactor 4 (Reactor 4 cost more and took longer even though we ostensibly learned from building Reactor 3). The "West" has lost the ability to build mega projects, and until we regain that ability, nuclear is indeed dead. Some minuscule part of the issue is the licensing and regulatory regime, but it's a complete cop-out to lay the entirety of the blame there.
The UK is in the exact same boat with Hinkley C -- initially licensed in 2012 with a budget of £18 billion, construction starting in 2016 and a completion date in 2025. Now we're looking at £50 billion in cost with 'best case' start dates in 2030. All of that to generate electricity at over $0.20/kwh wholesale.
Utilities are dragging their feet on interconnect. Tariffs are squeezing solar supply and probably will impact availability of materials and products (reshoring will take a lot of time if it even makes sense).
Nuclear regulatory environment is overly prescriptive. You need nuclear safety but you also can't use regulatory as a mechanism to shutdown all development - which has been the defacto case for the last 40 odd years.
Agree faster timelines are necessary -- we also need to see if this AI thing is real real or if its in over its skis a little bit. At this particular moment it feels like it might be selling more than it is offering - and thereby the energy demand won't materialize in the way that they assume...
Noting -- that the financial backers for energy products aren't all cash cows like tech companies -- they need to see real return on projects before they put up the necessary large amount of money and public-private partnerships given the risk on putting projects together like that.
