Though falling prices would be intuitive, with nuclear that's been found to be false, both in the US and in France. Building subsequent versions of the same design increase in cost, rather than staying the same price or going down.

France: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

US: https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

This is truly remarkable phenomenon that occurs with almost no other technology. And this happening in France rules out the possibility that it's merely increasing regulatory burden that causes increasing costs.

Those who want us to build new nuclear need to grapple with the issue of their cost if they want it to happen, yet I have not found a single nuclear advocate on HN that will acknowledge that these issues even exist, much less bother to propose some solution.

At least for the "safety" issues, we can have a discussion about how designs can mitigate that. But there also needs to be discussion on how design, workforce training, logistical management, or something can improve the construction issues.

If you build 11,500 nuclear plants they will have to be breeder reactors (or, we'd have to deploy 2 million square miles of uranium collector fields in the ocean if that could be made cheap enough to supply U for burner reactors.) We don't use breeders because they've proven to be more expensive than LWRs, not less expensive.