The high costs of Georgia's recent Vogtle nuclear plant are often blamed on regulation. However, the primary drivers were project management and supply chain failures, like ordering the wrong rebar, which caused year-long delays due to a loss of institutional knowledge.
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While solar panels are inexpensive, the total system cost to achieve 100% reliable, 24/7 coverage is massive. These "hidden costs"—enormous battery storage, transmission build-outs, and grid complexity—make the final price of a full solution comparable to nuclear. This is why hyperscalers are actively pursuing nuclear for their data centers.
The massive energy consumption of AI has made tech giants the most powerful force advocating for new power sources. Their commercial pressure is finally overcoming decades of regulatory inertia around nuclear energy, driving rapid development and deployment of new reactor technologies to meet their insatiable demand.
The collapse of Katerra, which burned through $2-3 billion in VC funding, shows that simply applying factory models to construction is not enough. The startup's failure highlights that deep, systemic issues like logistics, regulation, and on-site complexity cannot be solved by capital alone.
The push for massive overbuilding of solar/wind and gigantic battery farms is not an optimal grid strategy. It's a workaround that became popular only because of a pre-existing belief that building new, reliable baseload nuclear power was not an option.
While the FDA is often blamed for high trial costs, a major culprit is the consolidated Clinical Research Organization (CRO) market. These entrenched players lack incentives to adopt modern, cost-saving technologies, creating a structural bottleneck that prevents regulatory modernization from translating into cheaper and faster trials.
In the 1970s, France built 57 reactors in 15 years through its government-led utility, which repeatedly built the same design. In contrast, the US's fragmented private utility system, with each company building different designs, failed to achieve similar cost reductions and scale.
Construction projects have limited upside (e.g., 10-15% under budget) but massive downside (100-300%+ over budget). This skewed risk profile rationally incentivizes builders to stick with predictable, traditional methods rather than adopt new technologies that could lead to catastrophic overruns.
The restructuring of the U.S. electricity sector wasn't purely ideological. It was a direct response to regulated utilities making massive, incorrect bets on demand growth, building unneeded power plants, and causing prices to skyrocket for captive customers. Competition was introduced to shift this investment risk from consumers to private investors.
The "cost-plus" regulatory model allows utilities to earn a guaranteed return on capital investments (CAPEX) but no margin on operational expenses (OPEX). This creates a powerful, often inefficient, incentive for utilities to solve every problem by building expensive new infrastructure, even when cheaper operational solutions exist.
Contrary to popular belief, the NRC is no longer an insurmountable barrier. Recent bipartisan legislation under both Biden and Trump has modernized the agency, changing its mandate beyond pure safety and setting 18-month decision deadlines. The political climate for licensing new reactors has dramatically improved in just the last few years.