Even if you relaxed the safety regulations, natural gas has an edge with fracking.
I think most of the market burden stems from the regulatory delay and uncertainty. That delay and uncertainty makes it impossible to quickly build plants, regardless of how stringent the engineering specifications. And if you can't quickly build one plant, you can't quickly build ten of them, and you lose the expertise and proficiency needed to build them cost-effectively.
I remember reading an article about the South Korean nuclear industry. At their peak they could build a nuclear power plant quickly, on time, and on budget. Presumably these plants adhered to Western standards. Repetition built project management proficiency and a skilled, specialized workforce.
Ultimately I don't blame the regulatory agencies, per se. I blame the mandate they've been given by a very fearful population. Industry doesn't know what will pass regulatory muster because the regulators are winging it because the public makes safety demands completely divorced from concrete science and engineering.
My takeaway is that if you're going to regulate, you better be darned sure what, why, and how you're going to regulate. If you (i.e. Joe Public, Senator Smith) can't answer those questions, then regulation will prove disastrous. If you can answer those questions well than the true regulatory burden will quickly become apparent and industry will adjust accordingly or exit, without all the confusion, bickering, and wasted resources.
It's like with GMOs: people against GMOs (or proposing strong oversight) can't articulate well why, how, or precisely which aspects of the industry they want to regulate. Which makes it easy for me to vote against propositions purporting to regulate the industry. A poorly articulated solution is no solution at all, and a poorly articulated problem is strong evidence there may not be any problem.
Other problem is the long construction times. As the planning and construction time becomes a larger fraction of the payback time, the economics gets increasing bad. That's a problem for nuclear plants with 10-15 year construction time lines and 30 year payback. Compare with nat gas or solar plants with 2-5 year build outs. Worse nat gas plays back in 5-10 years.
And if their nuclear ambitions, in the end, didn't come to a whole lot more than ours did... well, why not? It wasn't "regulation", so there must be other structural factors at work, which may or may not be the same as ours.
They have not gone all in on nuclear and are exploring as many alternatives to coal as they can.
Why does it suggest that?
China has only been seriously trying to cut back on coal for ~10 years.
All it shows is that coal is cheaper than nuclear and that to a rapidly industrializing country cheap is more important than environmentally friendly.
On the other hand the US is shutting down plants and decreasing overall capacity.
China, as you observed, has no qualms about "environmentally friendly", so according to America's nuclear proponents, China should have more nuclear than us, not less, since it's cheaper. This is not the case, ergo their argument is flawed.
Your argument doesn't really make sense.
Nobody is arguing that nuclear is cheaper than dirty coal.
Proponents argue that it's cheap and orders of magnitude more environmentally friendly than burning dirty coal.
China is still very price conscious and are building out nuclear in an effort to reduce pollution - proving that the Chinese do believe nuclear can be done cheaply and safely.
With electricity, peak demand is king. It doesn’t make sense to build a billion dollar nuclear plant that isn’t needed except for August.
As it stands coal stations produce more nuclear waste than nuclear power plants https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...