Hinkley Point C is an example of high cost because of many of these same reasons. It is legendary in the industry for high cost. Mainly these cost are because

Hinkley Point C is an example of high cost because of many of these same reasons. It is legendary in the industry for high cost. Mainly these cost are because of the complexity and scale of the project. The licencing and regulation make the complexity and scale larger. To make mega projects like that efficient you need a trained workforce and that only happens if you build multiple plants. South Korea for example is building these complex plants at very reasonable time and price. They can do this because they have an industry and trained workforce. There has been a lot of study in nuclear economics and learning effects are hugely important. However that means that if a state (France, South Korea) adopts nuclear as a matter of policy and deploys in mass, it can be very cheap. However for other places I think new nuclear is the only hope. Advanced reactor companies are planning to be much smaller and should be build for 1 around billion. So yes, people were overly optimistic in the 1954 but we also have to recognize that nuclear technology development was very much hindered by a large number of factors and that we are deploying the same type of reactors now as 40 years ago. This is a sad state of affairs that hopefully will change.