Actually I think this is the perfect comparison to support my point, not refute it. China does not suffer from construction cost disease like advanced Western

Actually I think this is the perfect comparison to support my point, not refute it. China does not suffer from construction cost disease like advanced Western countries do. Their cost of labor is lower. And even France, which doesn't have construction cost disease as bad for the US for things like transit projects, does have this problem now as they try to build Flamanville and as was seen at Olkiluoto. My hypothesis could definitely be wrong, perhaps it's just logistics and even with our high cost of labor we could still build nuclear economically in the US. But having read everything I can get my hands on about how to improve nuclear costs in the US, I'm sticking to my hypothesis until I get data that refutes it. And it's not an engineering problem alone, though at Vogtle it's clear that part of the problem was engineering. EPC in general was a massive fail at Vogtle. But the partial design and bad design did not help either. This was the site where EPC thought the design was unconstructable, yet still powered thought to construct something else, and then had to get this new thing approved... Everybody working on it has been gearing up to sue each other at the end rather than trying to get it built.