Solar and wind have economies of scale and always have.
How Big Projects Get Done describes roads, wind and solar as three of the top five projects types for likelihood to come in on time and on budget.
Why? The first pour and the last pour on making a road are substantially the same. The people working on it get better at doing so as they go. They iterate on the process and reduce waste. Solar and wind are installing the same structures 10, 20, 50 times so they go fast once they start and the scope can be adjusted up or down as long as you have contracts in place.
Building a nuclear plant takes for-fucking-ever, there are a million different tasks to do, and they are built so far apart that getting the same team to build another means a long commute and a different local government to contend with every time. So budgeting is difficult.
What you actually need is mass production, and a regulatory environment that facilitates the same, e.g. by putting most of the certification in the design phase and then making production certification limited to the matter of whether what was built follows the certified spec.
The ideal would be to limit the on-site construction to common fungible commodities like pouring concrete and have any reactor-specific components mass produced in a factory. Then the same factory can be producing components for reactors whether they're going up in New York or Seattle or London and you get your economies of scale.
That would help too. I was thinking about the permitting issues with local authorities. Also having a permanent Federal team that does this (perhaps even in other countries?) would seem like a good way to retain institutional knowledge that would otherwise get lost if each project were a bespoke private investment project.
How Big Projects Get Done describes roads, wind and solar as three of the top five projects types for likelihood to come in on time and on budget.
Why? The first pour and the last pour on making a road are substantially the same. The people working on it get better at doing so as they go. They iterate on the process and reduce waste. Solar and wind are installing the same structures 10, 20, 50 times so they go fast once they start and the scope can be adjusted up or down as long as you have contracts in place.
Building a nuclear plant takes for-fucking-ever, there are a million different tasks to do, and they are built so far apart that getting the same team to build another means a long commute and a different local government to contend with every time. So budgeting is difficult.