Every year a reactor operates is a year of experiencing new ways they suck. The fixes and added complexities are rolled into the next reactor.

Thr grifters running the show also learn new ways to grift, so the small new delays and costs are amplified.

For older reactors the costs this imposes are rolled into operational budgets (and more often than not reactors are closed as unprofitable and the public or ratepayers are left holding the bag).

Additionally regulatory agencies keep finding new instances of fraud, stopping these adds costs to the regulator and regulatee.

This has happened since well before three mile island, so all misdirections to "scare mongering about meltdowns" are lies (the rate of cost escalation actually slowed significantly after three mile island).

Chernobyl and Fukushima. These two events, which between them account for a few thousand deaths at most (compared with the tens of thousands of deaths caused by coal in Europe alone, for example), triggered a panic fear of nuclear power.

For decades, the nuclear industry has been abandoned and sabotaged, with projects such as Phénix, Superphénix and Astrid in France, and virtually all new reactor projects, cancelled due to anti-nuclear opposition.

Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.

We can also thank the Germans for sabotaging the EPR. We started the project together, they forced us to add a lot of totally unjustified redundancies and safety features that made the prototype very complex and therefore costly to build, and then they slammed the door on us.