The US government already provides massive incentives for nuclear power, but even with those incentives, nobody is building. Maybe the American nuclear industry just has such an awful record of cost overruns that investors don’t want to give them any more rope. But if the Indians can run their nuclear industry in a more competent fashion, good for them.
Without the government's liability coverage for nuclear plants, none would ever be built at all. A nuclear plant is simply un-insurable.
To all those people who insist nuclear power is very safe: no private insurance company has ever concluded the risks are sufficiently quantifiable to offer insurance.
Not the way it's been done in the US. Every plant was essentially a one-off design, with all the risks you'd expect from a multi-billion dollar construction project with significant R&D aspects. The industry is trying to standardize on replicable reactor designs, but it's not a cakewalk. Even the French have had a lot of difficulty producing a standard reactor, and few countries have invested as much in nuclear as they have.
This is why I'm optimistic about smaller reactors like the B&W mPower reactor, or China's HTR-PM pebble bed reactors. They're meant to be cranked out in bulk, identically, and shipped out to wherever the site is.
The AP1000 also looks like a pretty impressive attempt at standardization, since it comes mostly in the form of factory-produced modules that get assembled on-site.
