We paid the first-of-a-kind costs, we should reap the Nth-of-a-kind rewards. Replace all the coal capacity with AP1000s.
The problem is, even after reaping this cost decline, totaling 50%, nuclear power is still noncompetitive in South Korea. They were built for energy independence after oil shock, not for cheap electricity.
https://i.imgur.com/J90HtWm.png
The Koreans just recently ousted an administration that was overtly hostile to nuclear energy and had declared a phase out. Now they are planning on increasing the share of nuclear electricity to 35%. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/South-Korea-incr...
Some states are going to cling to coal power past its economically rational lifespan because important parts of state politics are linked to coal businesses. States where coal retires for economic reasons will go for least-cost replacement (a blend of solar, wind, and natural gas). States where environmental concerns trump cost concerns have little if any coal generating capacity left to replace at this point.
Plus the federal government doesn't need to mandate it. It can simply incentivize these plants to be built like it did with Solar/Wind.
Meanwhile that same money would buy loads more power in solar/wind and batteries, which are proven technologies that are getting progressively cheaper.
An alternate timeline where we do MSRs in the 1950s and phase out coal by 1990 would have been possible but we didn’t do that and there are better alternatives now.
I have not seen any evidence that solar+wind will provide a proper base load of electricity, and it looks like MSR and its variants will give people the electricity they need.
Every non fossil source except hydro requires a large build out of grid scale storage.
It's true that MSR and Breeder reactors have lots of potential benefits over traditional LWRs but the truth is, LWRs are more than good enough for right now and we literally can't build enough of them if even if we tried.
You wouldn't want to power all of human society off of LWRs simply because they only access ~5% of the energy in the fuel. But we're so far away from that being a constraint. Build LWRs today and keep developing Breeder/MSR tech.