One thing I never understand about the "higher safety standards increase costs" argument is that those higher safety standards are also used as a strong argument on how safe nuclear is. But then it's criticized at the same time for driving the costs up. So either we have extremely safe plants that can be built and operated safely in the thousands worldwide, or we have cheap plants that can be built quickly, but at the expense of safety. Thus far we could not have both.
This seems like a basic pros/cons kinda thing? More safety margin means less chance of your reactor blowing up (pro), but it costs more and takes longer to build (con), so you've got to weigh those up and find a sweet spot.
