Remote reactor can turn into 2 projects. The reactor is your project. You control the site, contractors, design, schedule, financing etc. Remote transmission is a can of worms where your budget and schedule depends on landowners, governments, environmental reviews, permits, grid operators and protestors. They're basically your unintended shareholders in a project you never intended to take on.

Say the reactor is 200 miles from the grid. You might think ~$400M and a few years for the transmission line. Add right of way, substations, land acquisition, environmental review, permits and grid upgrades and you're potentially at $1B+ and 8-10+ years. For Northern Pass, a proposed 192 mile high voltage line that would have brought hydroelectric power from Quebec into New England Eversource ultimately spent $318M before the project was killed in 2019, mostly on engineering/design, siting, permitting, legal work and land acquisition. $318M just to hear "Sorry, you can't put a single cable here!" lol.

And this isn't just a nuclear problem. Right now ~2,060 GW of generation and storage projects are sitting in US interconnection queues, roughly twice the country's entire existing generating capacity. Projects that actually get built take a median of about 5 years to go from requesting a connection to operating, with studies and potentially huge grid upgrade costs along the way. Only about 13% of the capacity that entered queues from 2000-2020 was operating by the end of 2025. Interconnection uncertainty is one major reason why projects die, alongside the project's broader economics, permitting and financing.

This's probably unintuitive for people unfamiliar w/ electricity markets. Transmission is technically one of the simplest parts of the whole system, yet getting a new line built can become a huge project in itself. All those extra costs, delays and things outside the developer's control make the whole investment materially harder to underwrite. So if there's already a nuclear/industrial site w/ a big grid connection, that's a pretty meaningful advantage even w/ the obvious downside of being closer to population.

the plant still needs workers. workers have to live somewhere. their families want to live further. that is the fight. unless at some point it is 100% robots. until then someone has to be the person who lives next to it.