How about starting with mountainous environmental impact reports that no one reads? Theres lots of room for maintaining effective oversight while making the overall processes more efficient. The problem is the current processes were designed to be onerous due to those lobbying against nuclear power.

Also with new concepts like micro reactors or reviving long abandoned technology like liquid thorium reactors that would burn what we stupidly label “waste” and if the active systems are interrupted coast to a stop on their own instead of running away like our fast breeder water based designs a lot of the existing regulations and requirements are suddenly moot.

Most importantly Nuclear is the only “clean” technology that is predictable and controllable. Until you have a way to reliably meet base load requirements, fossil fuel generation is going to continue.

So if you really do think that climate change represents impending doom, resisting nuclear power is pretty dumb. It’s not perfect - but there isn’t any technology that is perfect or without some risk. Pretending nuclear is the only energy technology with serious issues is also dumb. 50 years of people painting nuclear as the boogie man hasn’t helped either. If you strongest arguments are emotionally based those aren’t very good arguments at all.

From the outside, you have large-scale accidents that caused a lot of fear that killed the drive for us. Notably Three Mile Island in the US and the effects of seeing what happened in Chernobyl that was drummed up by the US government to show failures by the Soviets (even though the Soviet reactor design was far more dangerous). Additionally, I live near a plant and they hold extreme safety training on iodine distribution and such to school children that makes kids fear the plant.

No denying that there's been fearmongering in general. But I'm still asking for an example of what regulation on the construction of nuclear plants should be changed.

What killed the drive for nuclear in the 1970s in the US was more that the costs came in very high, that electric power demand growth suddenly moderated, and that the grid was opened to external non-utility competition by PURPA in 1978 (four months before TMI).