Nuclear power is not too expensive, it's expense is artificial. Also - renewables can't provide base load energy to replace mos of carbon stuff. You need a powerful base load to support most renewables in the mix
Even back then, those economic comparisons were idealized for nuclear. Build it run it count up to the dollars and there you go. Except you need to secure it, you need to handle waste, and roughly the same cost over runs are bedeviling decommissioning as they were construction.
On top of all that, why is nuclear still uninsurable in the private market?
The cost of Nuclear has raised in the same way every other civil industrial project has risen.
A pipeline in Canada was supposed to be $8B it cost $30, subways and tunnels go 3-5x over budget because the actors can extract that wealth.
Think of the builders like Nvidia - they are not incented to build something for 'cost plus' - they want to make sure they suck all of the surpluses out they can. Why build for $10B when you can build for $35B?
Contractors are incented to price all the way to the point where it's 'not viable'.
Thats why with oligarchic vendors, you will never, ever have cheap energy. Never. Because the supply chain will take all the surplus. That's why we have competition. Groceries are not like that.
Insurance - this is a debilitating issues stopping nuclear because there's no way to know what the outcome would be. We don't know how the courts would rule on damages if there was a problem.
This is something that has to be socialized, at least on some level.
Farmers and property owners have to 'live with' the fact there are 300f monstrous windmills obstructing their view for the public good. It's minor but very real. In a more extreme case, we have to contend with the fact there are certain cases in which people may have to 'vacate their properties' in some cases. How do we compensate? It's hard to say, but that has to be worked out and made clear otherwise nothing will get built.
Regulations around storage are another problem - governments have not pushed hard enough for material solutions, kicking the can down the road because just leaving the problem sit in pools beside reactors was 'good enough'. Were we to have invested this for decades we would be much further along.
US, Canada and France etc. have pretty good records, though the US situation is too 'open' it could be tightened, and there's no reason we couldn't have already 35%-50% base nuclear energy all over North America.
Ontario does is quite well.
This should have happened decades ago.
You think it's axiomatic that the insurability of nuclear power has to be socialized. Insurability is a strong and reliable financial signal. We're seeing this every day in the tech industry now with data center build out that needs credit default swaps. If you can't buy insurance at any price, it's probably not going to end well.
Grid-scale solar plus batteries is cheaper? Citation needed.
Energy costs, of course, vary by location - so that linked report is the Australian national science (both theory and very much applied) body determining that conditions in Australia are such that the economics of nuclear power here have costs greater than that of grid scale solar + batteries + other storage technologies on horizon and being firmed up.
There are literally 0 confirmed deaths to due exposure at Fukishima. Zero.
Literally installing solar panels is more dangerous. Most of the are will be recoverable in a few decades.
The wars in Russia, Iran and frankly the entire Iraqi conflicts, and Yemen as well - are all 'Oil Wars'. Without high Oil prices and global dependency - none of that would exist.
If we had followed through with buidling out nuclear from the 1980s - and did it safely, we might have 1 more Fukishima, and also learned from it (there are htings about Fukishima that should have never happened) - and most of the West would have 50-65% base load from Nuclear.
We may very well have had all electric cars 20 years sooner and Oil would be used for jet fuel and a few other things. Maybe not even that, as we can synthesize fuel with electricity already.
Renewables are a long way off from covering the base load.
They are only now crossing the threshold into 'key supply factors'.
Renewables have been displacing traditional baseload generation for years. What grids actually need is reliable dispatchable capacity, peaking power and firming.
People keep bringing up winter cold spells and claiming we need "baseload" to handle them, apparently without realizing that nuclear never solved those demand peaks either.
Historically that's been the job of dispatchable generation.
Baseload is the minimum level of demand.