With 20/20 hindsight you could alternatively look at the situation from the point of view that non-nuclear plants have their own special financial advantage and

With 20/20 hindsight you could alternatively look at the situation from the point of view that non-nuclear plants have their own special financial advantage and delay-avoidance mechanism under construction. Remember TAEdison was involved with the earliest power plants, his type was no longer in control by the time nuclear came along. Electrification grew from a small business to a less-efficient but still money-making bureaucracy, nuclear augmentation started out as intricate bureaucracy to begin with. And "grew" from there, somewhat in response to "economies of scale". But the bigger the bureaucracy, the less efficient and that is supposed to be made up for by overcompensating advantages in other areas. This is hard to do and the delicate balance can be easily lost and then you get the overcompensating disadvantage of a money pit at scale where you can only slow or stop the deepening from there. Then there's the "big-ticket item" effect. The most persuasive salespeople sell the biggest-ticket items. Items. Since it's supposed to be good enough that you only need to sell one (if you can), and you rake in the bucks. This sets the scenario and the most persuasive suppliers and participants are simply all attracted to the huge pile of money that you don't normally get a shot at every year. Most of the players are the ones who have specialized as bureaucracies selling to other bureaucracies, usually government/miltary organizations funded by taxpayers who routinely are called upon to fund overruns. A lot of them are like middlemen that can not actually make money or go forward without the overruns for decades now, and when it's a shareholder project instead of a government project the shareholders may not really be ready for this. Anyway one time I bought some surplus stainless pressure tubing left over from a nuclear project. Every tube was hand engraved with a few tracking numbers which I expect were traceable to reference paperwork issued somewhere which probably did weigh as much as the tube itself. This was laboratory size tubing which exceeds the burst rating far in excess compared to larger diameters of the same material. However if pressures were ever to approach this extreme, the engraving itself would lead to premature failure and less predictable too. But if it blew up at least you'd know whose fault it was.