Suppose you tell a football player, your overriding priority is not getting hurt. If you get hurt or do anything that might get you hurt, you are out of football for life. Now go out there and win this game.
Those, in a nutshell, are the incentives the nuclear industry in the US faces. Whatever you do, you must never have even the tiniest release of radiation. Safety is the overriding priority. Cost doesn't matter. If there is any wiggle room in your cost structure, you must spend it on making the possibility of a release even smaller.
Meanwhile, we accept major amounts of smog and carbon dioxide emissions from gas power plants, we accept significant environmental degradation due to mining minerals for wind and solar plants, and we tolerate radioactive fly ash from coal power plants beyond the levels we would allow emitted from nuclear power plants.
> Fuel processing, spent fuel processing and storage and failure modes are absolutely not completely mitigated or even solved problems.
The French did solve this problem using a large breeder reactor where they reprocessed nuclear fuel, and the US was on track to build something similar in the 1970's until the Carter administration banned breeder reactors in 1977.
Choosing to not use a breeder reactor means spent nuclear fuel has to just sit there and be guarded while we also have to go and mine and process more nuclear fuel from scratch to run our existing reactors. It's hard to imagine a more idiotic regulatory regime.
> Well if 40 power plants are being built, you can't really say that their operational record is that they're "safe and economical" because they have no operational record
China has 60 existing nuclear power plants that have operated safely and efficiently, and there is no reason to think that these would operate any less effectively. They will likely be even more safe and efficient.
China has a single advantage over the US when it comes to nuclear: they can ignore people like yourself who don't understand how nuclear power works and just build it. The US would be wise to emulate that approach, especially given we do already do this when it comes to flock cameras or AI data centers.