[mandevil]

This might have been true back in the 1970s, but at least as far as current development goes, is not.

The only new (non-Russian) European design built in the past 15 years is the EPR at 1600 MW. The only new American design built in the past 15 years is the AP1000 which as the name suggests is 1000 MW (technically 1100). AP1000 uses a massively simplified design to try and be much safer than other designs (NRC calculations say something like an order of magnitude) but is not cost competitive against most other forms of power generation. Which is why after Vogtle 3 and 4 there are no plans for more of them in the US.

It's not that EPR is any better- they are actually doing worse in terms of money and time slippage than Vogtle did. Flamanville 3 had it's first concrete poured in 2007 and still hasn't generated a single net watt!

It turns out that the pause in building nuclear reactors in the west from about 1995-2005- both US (which actually was longer, from the early 1980's, after 3 Mile Island things still under construction were finished but nothing new was built) and Western Europe (after Chernobyl following a similar path) basically gutted the nuclear construction industries in both, and they haven't built back up. The Russians kept at it, and the South Koreans have moved in to the market (and China is building a huge number domestically, though I don't think they've built any internationally), but Western Europe and the US are far behind, and after Fukushima Daiishi I strongly suspect the Japanese are in the same boat. Without the trained workers you can't build these in any predictable way, and when you pause construction for a decade you lose all of the trained workers and it's really hard to build that workforce back up again.