Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
Without price anderson act dumping the liability on to taxpayers nobody would build nuclear reactors even at the cost they are.
Unfortunate, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
It's a shame it wasn't competitive.
Nuclear isn't uncompetitive due to some inherent technological reason. It's uncompetitive due to overregulation and gold plating.
Solar used to be completely uncompetitive, but improvements in technology and increases in scale made the economics work. Nuclear got kneecapped before that could have a chance of happening.
This is an oft repeated point by pro nuclear folk, but it’s not true. There are many regulatory regimes all over the world, and new nuclear is competitive in effectively none of them. Even in single party state china with few regulations , nukes are a declining share of total power every year.
They’re just giant big complex pieces of machinery. With huge ongoing security, insurance and deferred decommissioning costs.
Nuclear is so competitive that they had to ban it in Germany to get rid of it.
The implication you're trying to draw there is a non sequitur. That situation doesn't contradict what I said. Moreover, France is going to be dragged kicking and screaming into the renewable age because they can't afford to subsidize nuclear builds enough to make a nuclear approach work.