I am currently working on an initiative to build a refuge (a.k.a. bunker, bioweapons shelter, etc.). The work is funded by a seed grant from the Long-Term Future Fund.
My EA journey started in 2007 as I considered switching from a Wall Street career to instead help tackle climate change by making wind energy cheaper – unfortunately, the University of Pennsylvania did not have an EA chapter back then! A few years later, I started having doubts about my decision that climate change was the best use of my time. After reading a few books on philosophy and psychology, I decided that moral circle expansion was neglected but important and donated a few thousand sterling pounds of my modest income to a somewhat evidence-based organisation. Serendipitously, my boss stumbled upon EA in a thread on Stack Exchange around 2014 and sent me a link. After reading up on EA, I then pursued E2G with my modest income, donating ~USD35k to AMF. I have done some limited volunteering for building the EA community here in Stockholm, Sweden. Additionally, I set up and was an admin of the ~1k member EA system change Facebook group (apologies for not having time to make more of it!). Lastly, (and I am leaving out a lot of smaller stuff like giving career guidance, etc.) I have coordinated with other people interested in doing EA community building in UWC high schools and have even run a couple of EA events at these schools.
Apologies for beating the nuclear drum again, but I worry that you rely on only one piece of evidence in the following claim, and that evidence is coming from a single person (Jack Devanney) very invested (conflict of interest) in the nuclear industry. Why not use evidence that appears to have slightly less conflicts of interest and that is more aligned with good practice in research, such as peer review?
That said, I do acknowledge your use of the qualifier “in part”, but I worry that the example is not that helpful—I do not think nuclear energy in the USA would have progressed much quicker if it had less regulation. And in one sense nuclear energy already enjoys one quite substantial benefit compared to e.g. wind and solar: They are not liable for the damage they cause in events such as Fukushima and Chernobyl. Had they been forced to be liable for such damages, that would have added another 5-10 USD to the current, high LCoE for nuclear.
Another example of how regulation is likely not the main issue is the current investment by the nuclear industry. They are not spending most money fighting legal battles on regulation (such as the fossil fuel industry is doing). Instead, they are doubling down on SMRs as the nuclear industry themselves think the best bet of getting costs down is to have smaller plants that as much as possible can be mass manufactured in factories and assembled on site. A lot if not most of the high costs seem to stem from cost overruns due to challenges in project management—challenges that solar and wind overcome by doing minimal customization for each project and instead simply take factory built plants and assemble them quickly on site.