Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear partisans like to call renewables ideological, but I think this is another example of "the accusation is a confession". The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive. The current focus on variant reactor designs appears to be something of a Hail Mary attempt to get around this sad state of affairs. You sometimes see them making an argument about energy density, which goes back to Vaclav S…
>The empirical evidence has nuclear being uncompetitively expensive I have a solution, take the subsidies spent on "renewables" and put them into nuclear! Easy peasy!
Renewables have shown excellent experience effects. These effects are a kind of positive externality: improvements in the technology become available generally to future consumers. It makes sense to subsidize positive externalities, just as it makes sense to penalize negative ones.
If nuclear had shown good experience effects it too would have merited its subsidies. Unfortunately it hasn't done that.