The mask is off. Protecting the future of humanity isn't the goal; it's protecting their own egos.
Also, the green zone is managed by the British Government rather than the UN who are fairly supportive of nuclear. Nuclear is politically viable in the UK so it gets built. Onshore turbines in South-East England are not politically viable so they don't get built and we go offshore instead. The objective should be to stop climate change rather than chase optimal technology.
The word baseload always comes up in these discussions but its meaning never really gets specified in a very satisfying way. For example in GW needed for how long (i.e. GWH). Having such a number would facilitate a discussion about alternate ways how we would get that power more cheaply. That's not a debate nuclear proponents like having because it focuses attention on poor financial performance of nuclear relative to just about anything else.
The simple reality driving a lot of the decision making is that you simply get more GWH per $ with solar and wind. And not just a little bit; the difference is massive. And you get it much quicker too. And it's far less risky from a political point of view.
So instead of getting say 8GW with a very big nuclear plant costing maybe 30-40 billion and taking two decades to get built and planned with lots of uncertainty around the process, you can have 30-40 GW online two years from now for about the same amount of money. That's based on a price of 5000$/kw for recent offshore wind installations. A couple of hundred GW of wind came online over the last few years. The investments in renewables are massive and for good reasons: it delivers results quickly and prices are trending down.
Offshore wind is actually relatively expensive compared to solar and onshore wind. But also relatively reliable. People put solar on their roofs for less (2-3k/kw) and solar plants are even cheaper but of course less stable sources of power. Add batteries to the mix and other forms of storage (ammonia, hydrogen, thermal mass, pumped hydro, etc.) and there is no lack of a "baseload" that can't be planned for and mitigated. It will have a price and a certain capacity and that's what needs to be debated in Glasgow. It's a conference about allocating massive amounts of money in the next decades. The stakes are high both in financial terms and in the outcomes.
Nuclear might be part of this if the price is right. But the whole nuclear or nothing attitude is just not a very productive argument. Many countries that have the option are still doing some nuclear of course. But far less than what they are allocating for wind and solar (in dollars and planned GWH capacity).
As i mentioned elsewhere, much of Europe is currently facing an ongoing wind shortfall ( since around a month ago and projected to continue into the winter), which is adding extra fuel to the ongoing energy crisis.
To cover such a potential future scenario with renewables only, you'd need to build absolutely massive storage, which would certainly change the costs.
But in any case, fuck the costs - investment is needed into more nuclear, different types of storage tech, more renewables, because this is a very serious issue and making the wrong decisions purely based on costs would be really sad.
Additionally, most calculations that result in somewhat competitive prices for nuclear energy dismiss the implied subsidies (state guarantees as nuclear plants are uninsurable, waste handling until eternity) which are massive.
It wouldn't be if coal and gas were forced to completely capture their carbon externalities-- (e.g. recapture and storage).
Since much of the energy we get from burning coal just comes from liberating the carbon from a nice stored form in the first place, I wouldn't even assume that in a no-carbon-externality-world if coal was even an energy source at all.