I'm not sure why you were downvoted, as your guess was exactly right. The regulatory system for nuclear power (in the US, anyway) is incredibly screwed up, in w

I'm not sure why you were downvoted, as your guess was exactly right. The regulatory system for nuclear power (in the US, anyway) is incredibly screwed up, in ways too numerous to list. Just the delays from the bottlenecked building approval process can cause plant construction to run up billions of dollars in loan interest while they're waiting for the red tape to clear. China is currently building CPR1000 plants cheaper than coal plants of the same capacity. These are not meltdown-prone clunkers; they are upgraded versions of French designs with a good safety record. They're also starting a buildup of Westinghouse AP1000 plants, built to the usual western standards of safety and redundancy, and they're doing it a lot cheaper than the US and Europe. We see similar things in South Korea, which gets a large portion of its energy from nuclear plants, and is now beginning to export them. Considering how much safer nuclear power is than coal, paranoid regulations are actually making us quite a bit less safe by crippling our ability to build nuclear plants.