it would be a perfectly competitive form of power by 01970s standards, but naval nuclear reactors, chinese nuclear reactors, and russian nuclear reactors are not regulated into oblivion and have not had their economics wrecked by lobbying. nevertheless, they remain more expensive and less economical than even fossil-fuel plants in both warships and china. conceivably capitalism could solve that problem (us defense contractors and chinese power plant builders are pretty tightly state-linked rather than free-market actors) but we don't have strong reasons for believing so

crawford here talks optimistically about building nuclear plants for 250¢ per (nameplate) watt. europe and india are already building solar farms for 60¢ per (peak, nameplate) watt, a cost that is dropping dramatically year by year. he does plot some plants being built that cheaply in the 01960s in the us, in inflation-adjusted 02010 dollars, but for some reason he doesn't comment on that, and he doesn't find anyone able to do anything like that in recent years; the 'building cheaply' he cites in south korea and india is 190¢–250¢ per watt. this suggests that perhaps either the inflation adjustment or the original cost figures are incorrect

solar does of course have a lower capacity factor than nuclear, but there are numerous countries where it's 30% or better, so 60¢ per peak watt is still less than 200¢ per long-term average watt. also 60¢ today is 41¢ in the 02010 dollars crawford is using: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60&year1=20240...

i sympathize with crawford's leanings but even the most generous reading of his claims doesn't support the contention that nuclear can be built cheaply enough to compete with solar