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Nuke plants in North America particularly have been notororiously expensive and have overruns because each plant gets designed almost from the ground up, on an individual basis.
France picked one design and built it everywhere for decades at a time, vastly lowering the cost.
They also had a centralized fuel and waste depot as well as a school for nuclear engineers etc.
That is what you get with a nationalized nuclear grid that supplies over 75% of the countries power.
In the US we had an every company for itself system where the costs plans and services were not shared across the board to defray costs.
Another problem is reprocessing. We don't do it as part of our anti-proliferation policies within the civilian nuclear power sector. So all that potentially recoverable nuclear material is just sent to waste removal. Up to 95% of the uranium and plutonium can be recovered. Actual recovery is much lower (~30%), but at least it is something.
Also, Nuclear Plants aren't some magical independent energy source. Every Nuke plant is tethered to a dedicated COAL power plant that fuels the fission process.
While I am on the subject of Coal, A similar Coal Powerplant creates 100 times the nuclear emissions as an actual nuclear powerplant. Trace amounts of Uranium and Thorium are released in the burning process, and this adds up over time.
Then, of course is our completely retarded system of dealing with the nuclear waste.
Nuclear has a place as it already does power 1/5 of this nation. I would only want to see development of the nuclear generation industry restarted if we adopt at least partially the French nationalized system.
Anything less is wasteful and dangerous.
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