Berkshire Hathaway Energy said they would, from a financial point of view, never build a nuclear plant and keep increasing renewables. And they're not known to be bad capital allocators.
Also, what surprised me to learn is how much money goes into subsidies for fossil fuel companies. I really didn't think they needed that
In the US, the major nuclear projects are long running boondoggles, going way over.
In France, nuclear is so expensive that the national electricity company had to be nationalized to avoid bankruptcy, and plants are being closed.
Finland's Olkiluoto plant is 10 years over-schedule and has 300% cost overrruns.
South Korea had major cost overruns and is set to close half their plants
China isn't kind enough to share cost figures, but has reduced planned plants by a major percentage, indicating that the investment return is not very good. They do not have regulatory hurdles.
Maybe the only country on earth capable of building competitive nuclear is Russia of all places. They steadily increase the number of plants under construction and do not see to go over-schedule, though we don't know what the budgets look like.
While the US has a bad reputation for make infrastructure building ability, it seems to be global problem.
PRC is currently building indigenous nuclear relatively economically which appear to be performing around expectations. What happened / what PRC can't seem to do, like the west, is build _western_ nuclear tech economically. Nuclear ambition under 13th 5-year plan has been delayed largely due Fukushima reassessement and drama over western nuclear tech (French EPR / US AP1000 technical and political issues like US sanctions / Westinghouse bankruptcy) forcing PRC to switch to domestic tech. Current 14th 5-year plan still aiming for ~180-200 GWe by 2035 with ~150 reactors, which is in line with mid 2010s assessments. What is also happening is PRC scaling up coal and solar, due to geopolitics of rushing energy security and lower renewable costs, but not at the expense of nuclear rollout.
Maybe you can provide a link.
Because here in the US that's not the case. For the Three Mile Island meltdown, the cleanup cost was about $1 billion, and the vast majority was born by the private corporations, not by the public. Here's a GAO quote [1]
During the period 1979 through 1981, five federal agencies committed $275 million for TMI related matters, but very little of this money had been used to directly offset cleanup expenditures. However, the current Administration commitment of $123 million for data acquisition and research and development could directly offset as much as $54 million of GPU-budgeted expenditures. Other reductions have occurred or are expected to occur as a result of Department of Energy involvement.
That's called holding private corporations accountable for negligently contaminating the environment. There's a difference between the government paying to decom a well-run plant after 40-50 years, and sticking the taxpayer with cleaning up a mess that's not the public's responsibility.
Basically, if a nuke plant wants to operate, other plants will have to shut down to let them. And if the electricity price on the free market is below their guarantee, the government will pay the difference.