Ah, the US military, famous for building and operating things at low cost.
> Truth is the tech works
Nuclear propulsion works because it has the US military to secure it but more importantly, a carrier or a submarine benefits from not carrying fuel in a way that has nothing to do with economics. You power a submarine with nuclear simply because there's no other way for such a submarine to spend months at sea without refueling.
You say the tech works. OK, but so what? That has almost nothing to do with anything. In fact you're extrapolating the military use case for using nuclear energy for propulsion and saying we should extend that to civilian commercial power generation.
As for the rest about over-regulation, the first point is that you have to deal with the political and legal reality. But really it's a smoke screen because proponents of nuclear power like to talk about operating costs while ignoring capital expenditure (which is massive). From a total cost per kWh over the lifetime of a nuclear power plant, it's not really that cheap.
Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars. Strange but true.
This is just dismissing the argument without addressing the assertion that the vast majority of cost in building nuclear is imposed by overly burdensome regulation.
> Naval reactor "engineering laboratory technicians" (SMAGs) are reputed among submariners as habitual liars.
From personal experience, ELTs were held to the exact same zero tolerance for lies standard I was. If you were caught by anyone lying you were out. Rank didn't even mater, nor did it matter if they were nukes or not. If you lied and it was caught, nuclear career over. I watched many people end their careers over how many push-ups they completed in a fitness test, covering for a buddy who was out with a girl when they shouldn't have been, lying about getting a tattoo, or even lying about what they ate for lunch. It was absolutely brutal.
No, some of us actually have operated a reactor for a living, and have first hand experience with the technology, and most of the issues people like to discuss. In my case, I served in the US Navy in nuclear propulsion. This whole debate seems crazy. Truth is the tech works, and it should be inexpensive compared to burning fossil fuels. Then there is the absolutely incredible difference in energy density - a two 13mmx13mm fuel pellets contains roughly the same energy as 1 ton of coal, or 260 gallons of oil. As far as renewables go, it has to be much worse for the world to build the 1650 wind turbines, wire them, and so on that it takes to match a typical single civilian reactor. To those of us who have worked with the technology, we know it could really change the world's carbon problem.
The reason the cost is so high - and remember, the cost of technology usually goes down over time in a normal functioning market, is hyper-regulation at every level of government. From mining and refining fuel to building plants to operating them, there is an insane amount of regulation and litigation over that regulation. The over-regulation argument is really annoying, mostly because it is true.
It's also true that there are some issues around dealing with waste. Most of these are easily solved, but will not be for the same over-regulation reasons. We've taken perfectly good tech and through the power of bureaucracy, made it unworkable.