> Ok, so say they don't evacuate the city. What is the actual risk here that we're talking about?
The risk is that hundreds of people avoidably die of cancer over the following decades, and that you lose an immense amount of trust and credibility in government. This is not easy to de-risk because there are a lot of potential mechanisms for bio-accumulation/concentration, and by the time you find out what those exact mechanisms are empirically, the damage might already be done (and by then its too late, and people are no longer gonna trust anything you tell them).
I'm not arguing that the Fukushima evacuation was 100% the right call to make even in hindsight, but it was most certainly a defensible position (even in retrospect).
> Then do you potentially think that the reason the price is rising is because of regulation?
Strongly disagree with the framing. My opinion is that most early reactors did not meet modern safety/pollution expectations and quite frequently resulted in a toxic mess that still requires cleanup today (Sellafield would be a non-US example).
Despite all regulations, the safety track record (2 meltdowns at 500ish reactor sites) is arguably really poor, especially when reactor meltdowns had been portrayed as "virtually impossible" by early proponents.
> What other effect are you considering?
The very same effects that make bespoke heavy machinery comparatively expensive nowadays in general:
- Low benefit from industrial automation
- Mechanical engineering sectors have shrunk in the west (=> parts/subassemblies and qualified labor more expensive)
- Generally higher wages
Those apply much less to renewables because those are less labor intensive and benefit from economies of scale more (by design). Its also much easier to benefit from cheap foreign labor with those (especially solar).
As a sanity check:
I would always expect coal power plants to stay significantly cheaper than nuclear power (when disregarding CO2/fuel cost). But even in that setting, modern coal power (just like nuclear power) already struggles to compete with solar/wind on levelized cost basis today (and trends are very clear!)
So even if we dropped all nuclear regulation today completely (with disastrous likely effects) then the absolute best we could hope for would be to get competitive (on levelized cost) with the most expensive forms of renewables (offshore wind and rooftop solar). Given that it would likely take decades to act on such a plan, all the risks (and current downward trends on renewables and storage costs) chasing that approach seems utterly pointless to me.
Thus I believe the current nuclear approach (build a few reactors here and there so the know-how is not lost completely), which is exactly what both China and the US are doing, is perfectly sensible.