The reason nuclear isn't price competitive with renewables—or anything, really—is because of the amount of safety regulation and lack of experience building plants. Both of these emerged, at least in part, from decades of protests from well-meaning people with a laughable misunderstanding of how radiation works. So, you get people saying "don't build nuclear, it's unsafe!" and then you demonstrate that it's as safe as any energy technology in existence, so those people say "okay fine... don't build nuclear, it's expensive!" when they are the reason it's expensive. Meanwhile, we managed to create an irreparable 1.3C rise in global temperatures while waiting for solar, wind, and battery to catch up to where we could have been 70 years ago.