That's my point. They spent money in the name of safety that was probably mostly wasted. This inflates the "cost" of fission unnecessarily. So back to my original point. I think if you built standardized fission plants with a "proper" amount of safety, they could be run for far less than conventional fuel.
And here's the really dirty little secret. Until recently, utility companies, being regulated monopolies, got to make a profit of a particular amount over their expenses. So, how do you make more money? Just spend more in expenses. I have no doubt that a great pile of the cost of fission reactors was due to this artificial reason.
We need "real" deregulation of electricity to fix all these problems. Something that California doesn't yet have.