Nuclear was "competing" against coal when vendors were lowballing bids (or eating cost overruns themselves on a few fixed-cost contracts before they learned to not do that.)
The first nuclear building boom in the US went disastrously badly on costs. That's ultimately why it ended, not accidents or regulations. The economics just didn't work.
Forbes magazine in Feb 1985 said it well:
"The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power, with an additional $140 billion to come before the decade is out, and only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible."
The only places in the world where nuclear has "succeeded" are those where opaque financial systems have cloaked the true cost of the technology.
Before regulation changed, many being built and many more being planned, after regulation changed, no new reactors built in 30 years. The fastest energy transformation in human history, but I'm sure that just because of a managerial errors.
And as I said, the costs of those plants were escalating, even before changes to regulations. BTW, the most impactful regulatory change wasn't even targeted at nuclear at all, although a court ruling was needed to inform the industry and the AEC that the law (NEPA) also applied to nuclear power plants (Calvert Cliffs decision).
The first nuclear building boom in the US went disastrously badly on costs. That's ultimately why it ended, not accidents or regulations. The economics just didn't work.
Forbes magazine in Feb 1985 said it well:
"The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power, with an additional $140 billion to come before the decade is out, and only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible."
The only places in the world where nuclear has "succeeded" are those where opaque financial systems have cloaked the true cost of the technology.