[fortranfiend]

To restart a nuclear power plant, you must go through every planned maintenance activity that was cancelled or not done in the mothballed time frame, you have to inspect every pipe, every pump, every valve, test every breaker, snubber, and emergency diesel until every single device is satisfactory. On top of that cyber security regulations rolled out between 2003-2018 world wide for nuclear you would also have to do a mountain of paperwork to either confirm with NEI 08-09, the EPRI TAM or equivalent. You will likely have to upgrade your digital infrastructure entirely to get to that point as well. You would also have to hire in seasoned employees in operations, maintenance, chemistry, health physics, engineering, licensing, procurement, and security. Going from a barebones security staff guarding a long term storage yard to one protecting a full nuclear power plant would also take time. It would be 3 to 5 years to accomplish everything if money was not an issue.

All of this spend is on top of no electrical generation. And what parts were sold to other plants that now need replacements. So every industry that supports those parts and manufacturing would also have to spin up more resources. Economically there would be positive effects.

The reason the American plants are restarting is a lot of private capital, a lot of government money and a willing regulator. 2 billion usd is a steal compared to 25 to build a new one.