> The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.

That is not at all what I have seen, the costs tend to be from absolutely massive infrastructure needed to last a long time in harsh conditions that are difficult to repair.

Those seem more like fundamental engineering requirements.

Across four different regulatory structures: France, Finland, the UK, and the US, modern nuclear has proven to be excessively expensive and require massive amounts of high skilled labor. In the past century, high skilled labor was cheaper, but these days we need to pay welders and other construction workers higher wages because they have high productivity alternative jobs that pay better than in 1970.

Those high interest payments for 10+ years are also because EPC promises to build the design within 5-7 years then takes 2-3x the time. At Vogtle the fuckups both on design meant that many plans were "unconstructable" and then construction proceeded anyway with whatever they could wing together then they had to go back and make sure that whatever the bell was built still met the design.