I thought this in the mid-2000s, but the landscape has changed drastically since then in two ways: 1) solar wind and storage are decreasing in cost exponentially, and have crossed the inflection point where solar+storage is a firm energy source cheaper than building new fossil fuel infrastructure, and definitely cheaper than nuclear. 2) Attempts at building nuclear in the West over the past decade have revealed that our economic strengths no longer mean that nuclear construction is efficient or even reliably able to be completed. Since the 1970s, economic productivity overall has soared, but our construction productivity has barely improved. So, large construction projects that might have made sense in the 1970s are no longer economically efficient.

Nuclear has proven to be very unreliable to build due to massive complexity compounded by the need for extreme accuracy in construction, since we don't want to need to go in to fix core components after they've been turned on. This is precisely what advanced economies are not good at.

The new Summer plant reactors in SC were abandoned during construction after spending 9B. The units were nameplate rated at 2200 MW. Even at the point of abandonment, the cost of a MW was over 4 million. Solar is 700k to 1MM per MW. Wind is about 1.3MM per MW. Even adjusting for capacity factors nukes are more than twice as expensive per unit of capacity. Neither solar nor wind require difficult to produce fuel, produce nuclear waste, require waste heat reservoirs, or require years long complex and expensive decommissioning (which in the US is paid as a surcharge on electricity used). Solar or wind do have subsidies but nuclear gets a subsidy in the form of the Gov backstopping meltdown insurance (the current pooled industry meltdown insurance fund is like 20B, Japan has spent 200B+ cleaning up Fukushima). You don’t have to be anti-nuclear to think these huge projects that we can’t build don’t make a ton of economic sense at the outset (even factoring in the more desirable production characteristics which can be offset by more storage and/or overbuilding wind and solar capacity). In theory modular nuclear will solve some of these issues but in theory practice and theory are the same thing but in practice they aren’t.

Tbh the math is changing - largely due to the cost and complexity of nuclear projects.

If your spinning up a new GW of generating capacity, it’s easier to find spare room that no one fights over with solar/wind than it is to find a spot for nuclear.

Could we have faster permitting of nuclear plants and apartment buildings? Sure, will we? Almost certainly not.

I'm not against nuclear but I am against the old style reactors. You put in tens of billions into a single plant. The sunk cost fallacy is huge. People will cut corner because it means saving a billion here and there. We can't even update them. If the original design is flawed we'll have to keep running them.

It would be better if they were like cars or solar panels. Good for 20 years and then you replace them. With something as dangerous as nuclear the benefits of longevity are strongly outweighed by the downsides of keeping immature technology around.

To keep it short. Nuclear is not an attractive product. Change that.