Living in Austin, I plan to add solar to my house someday, and I would also love to see us build nuclear power plants.
I really cannot understand why people set these things at odds with each other. They are both better than fossil fuels or degrowth.
Mostly because in many places nuclear power is currently politically blocked from any further build-out, if not outright banned. One of the main rhetorical moves that various "green" (i.e. anti-nuclear) lobbies say to justify not building out nuclear power — which regulators seem to have absorbed and now believe — is "for everything we'd use nuclear for, we can just use PV."
This statement has a clear refutation: nuclear is base-load + grid-scale, while PV elastic-load + individual-site-scale; so if you need to e.g. double the electrical capacity of a large city in response to population growth, then PV isn't going to work—you want nuclear (or another base-load grid-scale power technology, like hydropower.)
But these arguments don't get heard; rather, the regulators say "but we have PV, what's the point in building nuclear rather than just supporting the build-out of more PV?" as a conversation-ending rhetorical statement.
In order to convince regulators to allow the build-out of nuclear, there has to be some equally-powerful rhetorical statement that can be used to "reopen the conversation." Which would, intuitively, come in the form of a clear and effective condemnation of PV as a base-load / grid-scale power technology. But if regulators don't understand terms like "base-load" or "grid-scale", then what you end up having to do to get them to stop packing up and shooing you out of the room, is to condemn PV full-stop.
The problem only arises when you don't charge coal and gas plants sufficient carbon/pollution fees, then they can underbid nuclear and drive it out of the market and stop it earning enough overnight.
to quote the nuclear industry:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/04/nucle...
> Nuclear could provide cheap energy but would only be competitive with gas and coal if carbon pollution is priced, nuclear association says
Because they compete for investment dollars from the government.
Why doesnt the government just fund the cheapest one?
Because the nuclear military industrial complex needs a civilian nuclear industry to operate cost effectively.
In other words, the thing that actually works is significantly less likely to happen, and therefore requires far more support.