In the past, even recently, I was an advocate for nuclear. I still would suggest any plants still operating continue to do so for as long as possible, and any plants already under construction should be completed.

But at some point, the evidence in favor of overbuild with solar and wind became too much to ignore. Your link about over-runs, which I'd never seen before, only adds to that body of evidence. Solar and Wind's over-runs are a fraction of Nuclear's.

Solar and wind have simply become so cheap, and nuclear so difficult due to the required generational knowledge being lost, that by the time you trained up enough people to relearn what the old builders knew, and built a sizeable amount of them, it's simply too likely that we could've built double the generational capacity with solar in the same amount of time with far less cost.

A major blocker of solar going even faster (In the us) is simply politics; how slow and understaffed the queue is to become connected with the grid, how terrible the system of who pays to expand the grid's carrying capacity is (the project that pushes it over the edge into needing an upgrade foots the bill, which often makes the project unprofitable, which makes them give up and not build), and how private power companies themselves push back due to a perceived loss of profit potential. But compared to Nuclear's hurdles, those seem relatively easy to overcome.

Maybe someday some company will figure out a way to make modular reactors affordable and quick to build, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

That's the thing about wind and solar; they look like a series of smaller projects instead of a mega-project. So you don't have that problem in the same way.

Not a stretch at all given they killed public transit in a number of American cities.

I diagree, at current tech/time energy storage is the problem with peaky production methods like wong and solar.

You need capacity and quick spinup capacity for when demand occurs off peak production. Nuclear is the only green option with current tech for large scale. Fuel cells would be ideal when powered with electrolyzed h2 created by excess solar generation capacity but the tech isn't there yet and we need something now.

Thermal energy storage and pumped hydro are both viable but spatially problimatic or expensive in the long term. IMO, micro grids with local solar as the source are where we should be going but local storage is an issue even where sun is abundant.