[pydry]

The regulatory hurdles are already low enough and nuclear is usually lavished with subsidies and good PR as well. This is because it shares a lot of the costs of running a nuclear-military industrial complex.

Baseload with 5x the LCOE of intermittent sources that takes 10-15x as long to build just isnt valuable to civvies when there are plenty of cheap enough storage options.

It's valuable to the military though.

[Qwertious]

It's not 5x, it's more like double AFAICT. Which isn't great, but compares reasonably to fossil fuels once you factor in greenhouse emissions.

It shouldn't be the default, but it has plenty of niches where it's clearly the best choice - for instance, in Japan/Korea/etc where the bulk of their energy is imported liquefied natural gas. There's very little space to build solar/wind and so nuclear makes a lot of sense there.