That's self-fulfilling. Solar was expensive. Then they built a lot of them, they got cheaper (+ better tech obviously). We know basically nothing about the learning curve of nuclear because we haven't met the conditions for the learning curve to apply, except maybe in China, where it seems to hold.

I just don't understand why everyone is so confident that nuclear power is the one thing that doesn't get cheaper with better technology and scale. Everything that is built is old tech, and, except in China and south Korea, built so rarely that the workforce is basically brand new every time. Of course they're expensive(in the West), they're one-off large engineering projects. All evidence points toward China, south Korea being able to do it cheaper and faster, so we should look there when there's sufficient (trustworthiness and quantity) data to test scaling laws. All signs point to cheaper and faster, but even then, the numbers of builds are relatively small, so you'd expect scaling gains to be modest. One of the main points of SMRs is to harness the effects of large numbers.

Why not at least try? Why are we so confident it will fail before even trying with modern designs?