My understanding was that the cost of nuclear started skyrocketing around the mid-late 70s, so around the period this study period begins to get data.
And I thought the nature of the cost increases was things like being stuck iterating on designs optized for being part of a weapons program rather than safety or economics, and making it difficult enough to get approval that only companies of the "win the contract, then hold the sunk costs to random for more money" sort would bother trying to build them.
That's not what the data says - although lots of nuclear proponents claim this. The data seems to show the opposite being true: new designs cost more to produce.
It is not just a misconception. It is a Big Lie, endlessly repeated, endlessly debunked. Continuing to repeat it makes one a Big Liar.
When you need to lie to make your case, you don't have one.
People started lying about nuclear power before it even existed: "Too cheap to meter", they said. Now with FOIA we have documentary evidence that they knew at the time it would always be a high-cost choice. But on the back of Red Scares and nuclear weapons tie-ins, they got and still get monstrous public subsidies, so we all pay, wherever we get our power.
In recent years, the agency that had once collected payments from nuke operators for waste placement has instead been paying out huge amounts to remaining operators, who pocket it.
The only bigger liar is fusion research. There, the only tech the feds will fund is hot-neutron fusion; that's the giveaway that it is really just a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work.
There will never be one lonely erg of commercially-viable Tokamak fusion. It can never even begin to approach competitiveness with solar + wind + storage, even without counting the enormous sunk cost of decades of $billions/year with nothing meaningful to show for it.
The continued hemmorhage of money for Tokamaks starves actually potentially-viable fusion programs.
The reason administrators like huge centralized projects like nuke plants always are is that they provide almost unlimited scope for corruption: steady, year-over-year corruption. Cost overruns are not accidental; they are the whole point of the operation.
Small modular nuke plants don't offer scope for as much corruption, so they would face an uphill battle even if they could be made compretitive. But even with huge subsidies and high pricing, they weren't competitive, nothing new has made them cheaper, and prices are still plummeting.
I understand it is a convenient misconception for some, though.
But, identically the same people are seen to repeat the falsehood. One cannot in earnest assume good faith of one who has already been seen to repeat a particular lie, deliberately, again and again and again. Repeating a lie over and over is a specific, and historically very successful, disinformation method with the technical name The Big Lie, most famously connected with Joseph Goebbels but explained by his proud teacher, Edward Bernays. Calling out instances of use of disinformation is an essential defense of any open forum.
This is a (very) common misconception.
A MIT study found that safety and regulatory increases contributes less than 1/3 of the cost increase in nuclear plants since 1975 (after adjusting for inflation):
Since many of the researchers are in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at MIT, they are able to go through and connect the cost changes to specific motivations and check these connections by looking at patents and journal papers that describe the ideas driving these changes.
Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators "required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material." Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects.
But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...