It would be beautiful if these costs led to safety and were justified.

Unfortunately that's nowhere close to the truth. If you look into it, you'll notice that you e.g. can't reuse a reactor design (after being safety certified) but must recertify the same design each time. Upgrades also require recertifying all parts. (You can also pause the certification process in certain geographies by suing for different types of environmental surveys, causing a new certification to start as the old one timed out.) As a result, we are all running old designs when far safer ones exist.

In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year).

> In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year).

And which they had bumped up a few years earlier so as to make -- claim it was, and apparently succeeding at fooling far too many people -- nuclear power "not financially feasible": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295272