Absolutely. Until the Cheney energy plan of 2005, it was literally impossible to make money on a nuclear reactor in the United States of America. The much vaunted Free Market™ totally bitchslapped the terrestrial fission industry with its invisible hand.
Under the Cheney energy policy the federal government provided operator liability limitations, taxpayer funded insurance, direct taxpayer investment, release from decommissioning cost escrow requirements, and per-watt subsidies to nuclear plant operators. This chicanery, combined with the greenwashing of nuclear power and the Bush/Obama administration policy of allowing relicensing of dangerous BWR designs past their design lifetimes, is the current economic reality of the US nuclear industry.
Unfortunately most articles on the subject are propaganda of one sort or another. You have to read absurd numbers of them and fact-check them against each other and independent sources. For example, the claim that terrestrial fission plants are overregulated and that regulatory compliance is overly costly can be persuasively framed, but it’s factually incorrect. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is the quintessential example of regulatory capture, and regulatory costs are only a very small percentage of the costs of terrestrial nuclear fission, although in absolute numbers such costs may seem quite large.
I’ll note in passing that the claim that privately owned nuclear fission plants could be profitable if they were not required to be insured by companies capable of paying for the costs of an accident appears to be true. This, again, is the work of the marketplace, presumably providing an accurate assessment of risk.
