> That's some serious cherry picking you're doing there.
Please identify the cherry picking.
> The LCOE calculations also do not capture other systemic costs or externalities beyond plant-level CO2 emissions such as, for instance, methane leakage during the extraction and transport of natural gas."
Absolutely! When you consider full system costs, nuclear gets much, much better.
With fossils, you have the minor externalities of climate change and other emissions, which are not taken into account.
With intermittent renewables, you have the costs of their intermittency. Those system costs tend to rise with penetration, and dwarf the LCOE.
For details in a model, see:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
And this also plays out in real life: electricity prices are highest in countries with high intermittent renewables penetration. The correlation is quite strong. And the inverse correlation, from high penetration to low electricity costs simply does not exist. There are no countries (or states) with high penetration of intermittent renewables and low electricity prices.
> So we can just gloss over the nuclear waste problem.
The opposite is true. Nuclear is actually the only power source that has to account for its waste already in the LCOE cost. And it also turns out that the waste is one of the benefits of nuclear, at least compared to other sources of electricity: there is very, very little of it, we know how to store it safely without problems, it actually goes away by itself and it is valuable fuel.
[Costs from 2-3 cents to below 1 cent]
> Startups have cost projections, sure. That's marketing material until they've actually built something.
Nope. Those numbers are usually the sorts of things they have to present investors to make their business case. People tend to vet those numbers pretty carefully before investing millions or billions of dollars. Also, if you lie in those numbers that turns out to be fraud and you can go to jail.
In other news: "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" -- Yogi Berra.