Yes, the industry is hamstrung by all the laws put in place by envirowackos. I have never been involved in the licensing process, but I worked on a project near a new nuke plant in the 80’s that was being licensed and I used a lot of the data they compiled for my work. It is incredible the amount of money the plant had to spend on the studies to satisfy the NRC.
One thing I have read about nuke economics was very interesting to me. In the book “Gusher of Lies”, Robert Bryce, 2008, he has a chapter that discusses a nuke plant outside of Austin, TX that was plagued by cost overuns and was deemed economically bad. UNTIL, the price of natural gas spiked and it suddenly became the cheapest source of power in the region. This will happen all over the USA eventually, so we need to start building nukes now. If you are interested, Google books has “Gusher of Lies” on the web, but I am not sure the chapter on nukes is allowed in the preview.