I'm fairly convinced nuclear fanboys on reddit are either paid astroturfers or LLM bots paid for by the oil and gas industry to derail renewables

Usually they prefer other platforms.

I am a nuclear fanboy, because it is a clean and safe form of energy. But the EPR costs and building time are a tragedy for the entire sector and I have no problem in admitting that. But there are good third generation reactor like the hitachi abwr that are fast to build (less the 48 months) and relatively cheap (less than 5 billions).

The real problem is the amount of safety changes required to gen3 design after Fukushima (that was a gen2 reactor that suffered the worst earthquake and tsunami ever in the history of Japan and caused maybe a 1 single death after 4 years, just to put things in prospective).

But this is a problem in general for European nuclear. An APR-1400 costs 4.5 billion in Korea and 9 billions in Europe.

Nononono, nuclear power is cheap and safe!

Also, nuclear plants can't explode!

A nuthead will still tell you that wind is no equivalent because of missing winds.

You might have to factor PV and batteries in to make a even better point.

I live not that far away from a (now decommissioned) nuclear power station, and from what I keep hearing from old people who lived through the time of its construction, there was a lot of lenience and looking the other way involved. For instance, (A very persistent) Rumor has it, that many houses built in the nearest town around that time, had their foundation, cellar walls, and floors poured with the heavy anti-radiation concrete intended for the power station, because quite a number of the concrete trucks destined for the containment building (which is made of an awful lot of concrete) did conveniently take a wrong turn and ended up at the wrong construction site for some odd reason. (Maybe the drivers getting a case of beer for every detour they took might have been a factor)

Makes you think how any of the old plants were ever built.

Experience. The first one you build will have massive teething problems, but then the second one will just be a copy of the first.

The problem nowadays is that we in the west go "Oh no, learning stuff was expensive! Lets not use any of that and instead never do this again!" then, ten years later we start over again.

I beg to differ. For a start the 3.5 billion figure is for the reactor alone. The whole project was calculated to cost 8 billion and of course it got more expensive.

Hinkley Point C is getting built by EDF (France) and China General Nuclear Power Group.