Almost all nuclear plants in the west were built in the 70s and 80s. The number built since is miniscule so of course the costs are going to be huge, they're one off projects.

True but irrelevant. The construction of new reactors now is unlikely to be in numbers greater than back then.

(Unless new ones are SMR, which is why there's now business interest in SMRs. They may well have numbers large enough to cut costs).

The other issue is that nuclear research has been underfunded for decades. We could have had new safe effective and cost efficient designs.

That is why I say "might, possibly", rather than being firmly yes or no.

R&D is high-variance.

Research is, engineering less so.

Nuclear energy has had a massive research advantage over its entire lifetime. It simply never delivers due to being horrifically expensive.

You just keep making empty promises that never work out in reality. Just look at Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.

You want more of that?!?