There is no discussion of power without knowing the:

1) current state of LCOE costs of different power generation methods

2) future LCOE evolution/drop in the relevant power generation methods

"Without nuclear, advocates say, we would need to build far more wind and solar power plants to ensure reliable supplies, doubling or tripling costs over power networks that include nuclear."

Look, if you look at last years Lazard's LCOE report, incumbent nuclear is 5x to 6x as expensive as wind and solar. So, uh, yeah, its cheaper to overproduce capacity than build nuclear. That's from point 1: the CURRENT state of LCOE.

For "new nuclear" to enter the equation in current regulatory politics and costs, it won't power up any new plants for about 10 years.

The second point about LCOE comes into play: solar/wind are STILL DROPPING in cost, and almost more significantly, grid storage will probably see the sodium-ion battery and perhaps the sodium-sulfur battery in that time, dropping storage costs by at least 50%, perhaps 80-90%.

Solar cells will likely see some multijunction silicon-perovskite cell come into production, and possibly a full perovskite cell, in addition to increased economies of scale. I would predict in 10 years the cost of a solar cell is effectively 1/3 to 1/5 of current day prices (inflation adjusted yada yada).

Wind will likely be less revolutionary, but I suspect it will drop still another 50-70% in 10 years.

Meanwhile, this is for nuke plants 10 years out, that really don't have new gen designs ready to go. I will be kind and say plants we started funding now are only 4x as expensive as current solar/wind. But by the time they get built, they will probably be 10x as expensive.

I'm sorry, I love nuclear power, it is so cool. But the nuclear industry needed to solve its problems about 20-40 years ago. It's leadership could have embraced global warming decades ago, but the leadership of nuclear is staunchly conservative, owing to a seething resentment of regulation and government oversight.

I believe there exists, possibly a LFTR, a scalable, cheap, safe, near-zero waste reactor design that can be deployed as industrial power generation and perhaps competitive grid power, when combined with regulatory reforms in the goverment.

But that design and reforms needed to happen about 25 years ago.

Now nuclear needs to hold onto its existing plants, research new reactors (US National Labs have started new nuclear research including LFTRs, again, about 25 years too late), and prepare for when solar/wind stabilize in costs such that a price can be targeted with a true new generation design.

As for grid leveling, old gen nuclear doesn't switch on or off fast enough (LFTR can, maybe pebble bed can too), but it could do "three days of storms" generation. But it still isn't as useful as say natural gas turbine for that (which obviously releases carbon).

Alas the LFTR/MSR design is still unproven for a long term industrial standpoint, and has numerous materials issues. China has an MSR up supposedly for a year or two.

It is true that regulatory barriers, NIMBY, and other politics increase costs and delay projects in nuclear, but this is also a convenient boogeyman for them to point to. If only the "magic regulatory framework" existed to let nuclear projects freely be built then... costs would still be higher than everything but coal.

The LWR just isn't competitive, and I suspect any non-breeding design that can't also transmute waste to usable fuel (LFTR can supposedly do this, I think some other breeder reactors can as well). Because waste solid fuel is either expensive to transport and "dispose" at Yucca and is a whole entire extra bunch of NIMBYism and regulatory oversight, or difficult to reform/reprocess into new fuel.

LWR only works on a small portion of Uranium ore, and even when the rods are formed from that fissile Uranium, only a fraction of the fuel is used until the transmuted byproducts of fission spoil the rod.

LFTR has on-line reprocessing of its liquid fuel for extraction of the fission byproducts, so there is ... kind of ... 100% fuel use, and ... kind of ... no waste to transport. I don't want to handwave away (because I don't know the full extent of) all the chemistry and processing needed to handle that (and there are holding tanks for waste that needs to "cool" over months or years).

Other things I would dispute: solar land use is not a big problem. For one, there is this thing called roofs, and there are a lot of them. There are also lots of parking lots, roads, etc that no one wrings their hands over.

Rooftop solar is a lot more expensive than grid solar (and I think it is a scam that it is that much more expensive) but... it would STILL be cheaper than nuclear to put rooftop solar on houses and equip them with their own storage than build new nuclear plants. Such a program would vastly increase civil resilience to disasters and reduce the need for as much "smart grid" development.

With the failure of NuScale, which all of a sudden is the people "not doing it right" for the industry, the actual viability of next gen nuclear took a big hit, and with it basically the last hope of nuclear being a part of the next 20 years of power generation outside of "keeping the current ones on". If the nuclear industry had a usable SMR design about 10 years ago specifically for industrial application, nuclear would be in a healthy place.

And of course, nuclear needs to compete with the ultimately scalable power source: solar and to a lesser extent wind.

Now, I am no Nuclear Engineering PhD-wielding expert, but I've been professing this opinion for a while on here, mostly in hopes of a constructive counterargument or hope for "new nuclear", but ... basically crickets. Which leads me to conclude that nuclear is just shilling these puff pieces to desperately keep the lights on or keep governments investing in whatever new projects there are. And to emphasize, governments should keep up heavy research into new designs for nuclear: there are simply far too many powers-of-ten in energy density involved here.