Why is the nuclear power industry stagnant?

Is this really what German press is reporting? What a gross lie. The "overheating" is neither due to the reactor (simply it getting hot naturally) nor actively threatening to the reactor: they are just stopped to avoid making the situation slightly worse. Temperature difference at the output of a nuclear plant is barely a degree.

And then you have the Austrians who try to cancel our nuclear power plants directly through activism, etc.

-Triaxial accelerometers and spectrum recorders were added to much equipment, piping, and containment.

-Reg Guide 1.117 required protection from 360 mph tornado winds, in some cases increasing building wall thickness from 18 inches to 24.

-Drain systems for firefighting waterflow had to both prevent fire from spreading and also sample water for radiation.

-Swing diesels at multiunit plants were prohibited by RG 1.81.

-Liquid radwaste had to be solidified before shipping with cement systems costing $20/kW.

-Anti-sabotage measures attempted to avoid any one person in the maintenance crew from working on a set of redundant equipment

Are you suggesting that these should be changed and that these will reduce costs significantly?

Because it's not these regulations that caused massive overruns in Georgia and South Carolina, so I don't know why that will help. There are far far deeper issues in the industry, which is deeply troubled and incompetent.

Later on the venerable 2018 MIT report is cited, which is a far far far better root cause analysis of nuclear failure than "regulations." It doesn't recommend changes in regulations, but it does suggest more speedy approval of design changes during construction, to which I say, great. Make nuclear construction agile.

Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining

This severely limits the amount of nuclear we can use in the biosphere, as every TWh of useful energy results in roughly a TWh of heating that needs to be dumped somewhere without negatively impacting the environment.

Meanwhile, solar and wind do not have that scaling problem, and there is way more spare land available to generate more energy that we can currently imagine what to do with.

As for intermittency, we will simply design the future electrical grid exactly the same we design it now: we build our minimum capacity to the the maximum usage. We haven't done that yet with renewables because we are still building. Anti-renewables nuclear advocates never seem to realize that about our current grid, that we have huge huge huge capacity that is almost never used. It will be the same in the future, with renewables, to an even greater degree. The difference is that renewables don't have fuel, so unlike all those peaker gas plants, the cost of using that additional energy capacity is near zero, as long as there is transmission capacity.

A grid powered by renewable energy is one where we will have incredibly energy abundance, huge amounts of curtailed energy that are not used because the energy is not in the right time or place. The amount of excess energy will be determined by the relative cost of generation capacity versus arbitrage capacity for place (transmission capacity) or time (storage).

A renewables powered grid is a huge step up on the energy ladder, and will enable far far cheaper and more abundant energy than a nuclear grid ever could.

Which isn't to say I'm against nuclear; if the industry ever gains some basic competence and can keep their promises, and the promises are competitive or complementary to storage plus renewables, let's build more. But it is the responsibility of the industry to improve, and prove to others that it has finally improved. And as long as people are running around blaming nuclear's decades of failure on everything except the true root cause, poor construction, nuclear will never have a chance to improve.