Yes. Though the high capital costs for nuclear are mostly down to policy, less so to technology.
I wasn't suggesting we need to skimp.
(Similar to how my suggestion for air travel would be to make planes as safe as eg trains.)
Wind has become cheaper (but not more reliable) because thousands of turbines are being installed each year. If they were built at the same rate as nuclear, they would be even more expensive (and still not able to provide base load power).
Nuclear fuel can be stored safely (look up Sweden and Finland’s joint project) until it can be burned in next generation reactors, which are being designed and tested as we speak.
Please don’t straw man on HN. It’s destructive to the community and really bad mannered.
The practice of running dangerous/obsolete plants until EOL is absolutely absurd though. How can one tell the people that modern designs will solve all safety problems if plants older than the one at Chernobyl are still operating to this day?
I disagree about what you say about wind though. Wind power is massively benefiting from the same economies of scale that small reactors would benefit except they do so on a much bigger scale.
Similar considerations apply to some nuclear power designs. In addition, many nuclear power designs are saver per Joule when build on a larger scale.
Of course, safety would still benefit from the experience from building more of any one design.
The absurdity of running old plants past EOL is directly tied to how hard / impossible it is to build new plants.
Crazy enough, the rest of Chernobyl power plant continued to operate for a long time after the famous accident. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Do keep in mind that public opinion demands nuclear to be ridiculously safe. And even the Chinese government cares about domestic popular opinion, even if they don't run a democracy.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/12/138271/chinas-lo... supports that public opinion interpretation to some extent.
I did a bit of Googling, and eg https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw... suggests that nuclear is orders of magnitude safer in terms of fatalities per Joule than most other energy sources.
See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy for an alternative source or https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
If we scaled down the safety of nuclear to eg the safety of natural gas generation (still miles ahead of oil and coal), we could surely safe a lot of money. And we could probably replace lots of oil and coal generation, thus saving lives as well.
TL;DR: policy forces nuclear power to be ridiculously safer than other power sources. But governments are at most indirectly to blame: they are just following public opinion. Democracy at work.