Seems like it's a function of the free market and politics—there is a spectrum of regulations we can have that ranges between "enough to keep nuclear energy safe" to "enough to make even the best nuclear technology non-viable", and where we fall along that line is primarily a political question.

Yes, that is true, and the regulatory environment is a big part of why current nuclear tech is non-viable.

> new nuclear plants can't compete with solar / wind and storage combination

There dose not exist to my knowledge (would be happy to be proven wrong) any storage solution that currently operated commercial from buying cheap renewable energy at peak production and regain investment and operational costs by selling it expensive during lows. Not a single one in the world.

At best any comparison between storage and nuclear plants is between two currently non-viable commercial alternatives, both requiring massive government funding to be built. The only commercial viable power source right now is renewable that can compete against fossil fuels when the weather make it viable, and fossil fuels as base load and as a dynamic source that can spin up based on weather conditions and demands.

You quoted a part of my comment and then ignored it in yours. Fossil fuels don't even enter into my comment, I'm merely pointing out the the multiple billions of dollars and multiple years required to create a new nuclear power plant make it non-viable when compared to the current cost of renewable power and grid scale energy storage. These are publicly available numbers, you are free to look it up and do your own calculations if you doubt me.

Also, you're simply unaware of commercially successful energy storage. The most high profile example being perhaps the battery pack Tesla installed in Australia for $90.6M AUD, and generated $13.1M AUD in revenue in just six months[1]. Clearly a very good ROI. Pumped Hydro is used all over the world and is even more cost effective.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/25/18715585/tesla-australia-...

Im trying to find a source that the battery pack Tesla installed is used to buy cheap renewable when the price is low and sell when it is high, but the linked article does not state this and the article it link as source for the 13.1M AUD is behind a paywall.

Pumped Hydro like Bath County Pumped Storage Station does exist but do not seem to buy cheap renewable when the price is low and resell it when it is high, but rather operate as a balancer for PJM Interconnection which get almost all its power from fossil fuels.

So do you have a link for a profitable battery that buys energy from renewables when there is an overproduction from renewable sources and then later sold when the prices has risen? That would be a solar / wind and storage combination. Using energy from fossil fuels to pump water is just not the same, even if doing so creates a profit for the company.

Every time I have read about a new storage facility they usually start with first describing capacity, then go on to say that this can enable a future use with renewables, but that right now it operate to balance the grid of existing (mostly fossil fuel based) power plants. I would very much like to be proven wrong and that there exist a viable commercial operation where we can see X amount of green energy produced by wind and solar going into the storage, and X (minus a conversion cost) of that energy going out, with one table showing how much the green energy costed when going in and an other table showing how much they got in profit when it went out.

Why would you ever build a company around arbitraging power and all the risk involved, when instead you could just buy panels or wind turbines and skip directly to selling power?

I don't know, ask Elon:

"Tesla applies for UK power generation licence in [virtual power plant] play. ... The move suggests Tesla may be planning to build large-scale battery storage projects in the UK"[0]

[0] https://theenergyst.com/tesla-applies-for-uk-power-generatio...

Arguably nuclear is only expensive because we've lost the skills to build it at scale and quickly, I the 70's it did not take 15 years to build a power stations, and neither does it in China today - they are building reactors at unprecedented scale, cost effectively and on schedule.

In 2009 their intention was to "raise the percentage of China's electricity produced by nuclear power to 6% by 2020"

In 2019 nuclear produced 4.9% of the gridpower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

This is hardly an "unprecedented scale", which AFAIK lies elsewhere: https://unfccc.int/news/china-and-india-lead-global-renewabl...

Yes, much like the US has forgotten how to build subways, tunnels, bridges, and infrastructure cost effectively in general. I don't know how that happened, and I think it's a pretty sad outcome.

Maybe in a different regulatory and economic environment, nuclear could be competitive. I don't know. Even coal is becoming uncompetitive in the US compared with renewables, and it's a lot cheaper and lower risk than nuclear.