Until the shale revolution, natural gas wasn't cheap enough to stop new coal plants being built in America: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=308

Until the shale revolution, natural gas wasn't cheap enough to stop new coal plants being built in America: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812 In the 1990s new gas plants eclipsed new coal plants but the coal builds didn't stop. (In particular, this chart: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2017.04.17/chart2.png https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2017.04.17/chart2.p...) That last small burst of coal plants on the chart around 2010 were planned and built around the elevated natural gas prices of the pre-shale years of early 21st century. I agree with you that cost is a much bigger problem than regulation for new-build nuclear plants. If the problem were just the cost of steam equipment then America would have been building more reactors through the 1990s and into the 2010s, like the coal plants that were built.