The Canadians, Brits, and increasingly Europe are all looking at similarly high costs for new unit construction. That is a prime reason why Canada, for example, abandoned building new units and instead decided to refurbish Darlington for the still impressive price of more than $2B per unit. The economics of new plants compared to alternatives (gas or renewables) is very poor at present.
And just about all of that comes from rules and regulations. Some of it is reasonable safety, but, not all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmc...he-west-hint-its-not-regulation/#7480eb7d5d1a
"In the East—in Korea, in China and the UAE, which is being built by the Koreans—the cost is $3,000-$4,000 per kilowatt, whereas in the West the cost is north of $8,000 per kilowatt. The question is why."
But, here is a deeper dive.
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html
This process came to be known as "ratcheting." Like a ratchet wrench which is moved back and forth but always tightens and never loosens a bolt, the regulatory requirements were constantly tightened, requiring additional equipment and construction labor and materials. According to one study,4 between the early and late 1970s, regulatory requirements increased the quantity of steel needed in a power plant of equivalent electrical output by 41%, the amount of concrete by 27%, the lineal footage of piping by 50%, and the length of electrical cable by 36%. The NRC did not withdraw requirements made in the early days on the basis of minimal experience when later experience demonstrated that they were unnecessarily stringent. Regulations were only tightened, never loosened. The ratcheting policy was consistently followed.
In its regulatory ratcheting activities, the NRC paid some attention to cost effectiveness, attempting to balance safety benefits against cost increases. However, NRC personnel privately concede that their cost estimates were very crude, and more often than not unrealistically low. Estimating costs of tasks never before undertaken is, at best, a difficult and inexact art.
In addition to increasing the quantity of materials and labor going into a plant, regulatory ratcheting increased costs by extending the time required for construction. According to the United Engineers estimates, the time from project initiation to ground breaking5 was 16 months in 1967, 32 months in 1972, and 54 months in 1980. These are the periods needed to do initial engineering and design; to develop a safety analysis and an environmental impact analysis supported by field data; to have these analyses reviewed by the NRC staff and its Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards and to work out conflicts with these groups; to subject the analyzed to criticism in public hearings and to respond to that criticism (sometimes with design changes); and finally, to receive a construction permit. The time from ground breaking to operation testing was increased from 42 months in 1967, to 54 months in 1972, to 70 months in 1980.
The increase in total construction time, indicated in Fig. 2, from 7 years in 1971 to 12 years in 1980 roughly doubled the final cost of plants. In addition, the EEDB, corrected for inflation, approximately doubled during that time period. Thus, regulatory ratcheting, quite aside from the effects of inflation, quadrupled the cost of a nuclear power plant. What has all this bought in the way of safety? One point of view often expressed privately by those involved in design and construction is that it has bought nothing.