And nuclear has its own set of toxic metals. Hell even coal has a heavy metal issue.
https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/255639/radioactivity_lecture_18....
While the International Energy Agency fully champion the use of renewables, they also take a vey pragmatic data based approach to global energy consumption and production and believe that nuclear power must compliment future energy creation more or less as it does today; providing some 20% of total electricity in advanced economies.
Saying nuclear is "effectively irrelevant" is numerically equivilant to saying the third child in a two parent family is "effectively irrelevant".
They acknowledge that AGW is real and they push for an optimal path forward through energy transition .. and they don't see a downside to maintaining existing reactors and maintaining current share.
Thank you for your opinion none the less.
The argument, as it has been for about 40 years now, is that the people saying it is not cost competitive tend to have high overlap with people who are changing regulations to ... make it very expensive. If the regulatory framework was sane, it'd be quite cost competitive.
The problem nuclear has is the economic learning curve has been inverted. That can only be caused by overregulation.
That reads like a creedal statement. We see the same effect in all regulatory jurisdictions, indicating the effect is instead intrinsic. A more fundamental observation is that the more we learn about building nukes, the more expensive they get.
Getting rid of coal (and natural gas, to lesser extent) should happen ASAP, and nuclear can be a part of the solution for the transition period.
The IEA WEO is infamous for its inaccurate solar capacity forecasts over the last 10-15 years. They repeatedly assumed annual solar additions would flatten out (i.e., future years will not see more additions than recent years), despite the roughly exponential growth that was obviously happening. After doing it 5 years in a row, you have to wonder what was going wrong…