> When the United States built nuclear plants at scale, in serial production, plant costs were also much lower.
As far as I know, there was never a time where US nuclear power plants were built on time and at budget (and that's while building more than France ever did).
They were still over budget and late, but that chart (which was created to try to claim all the overhead can largely be explained by regulatory changes) strongly argues against
> When the United States built nuclear plants at scale, in serial production, plant costs were also much lower.
See this cluster of power plants in the second half of the 1960 [1]? This is when lots of plants were built around the same time, leveraging economies of scale. All of those plants were built at less than $2 billion per gigawatt of capacity, most of them closer to $1B per GW. This is about an order of magnitude less than the one-off construction that's been done since then.
Those are construction start dates, and construction duration in that era took 5-10 years in that era according to that paper. Construction of that cluster overlapped considerably with the later more expensive plants (some even finishing after 1979).
