>But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity.

Because the level of permitted development without being crushed by onerous regulatory burdens has been absurdly hamstrung on nuclear. All of the issues you add as "but" cases are things that many different innovations in a fluid market for research could have refined. The same has been done for many complex technologies over the decades, yet for nuclear there's always some excuse like the ones you mention. The comment you replied to is right. We're talking about something that since decades ago could have been improved enormously, and hasn't been thanks to a multitude of stupidities.

The United States Navy trusts extremely compact reactors (designed and working despite the DoD's notoriously lax financial and schedule stringency with defense contractors) to power its absolute most important, costly, defense-crucial war machines, and regularly docks them right inside the country's (and world's) largest urban areas, but somehow there's just no way to make nuclear power for civilian use more compact, cheaper and effective?

> Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience.

I am imagining a field of shipping-container sized units, each of which is a small modular reactor. Probably with solar panels on top ;) Still a few orders of magnitude different, but the idea here is that each unit is small enough that it can be manufactured, so that nuclear plant bring-ups don't take 30 years. Most of the cost is because of the tremendous generational effort involved in just a single project; what does it take to reduce the cost of the plants themselves to the point where they can really shine, economically?

The goal is to have reliable base load power generation so that we don't have to deal with the massive complexity and carbon footprint of battery plants all over the place to deal with peaky generation technologies like solar. I don't believe that that is a solved problem: using tremendous amounts of rare earth materials for limited-lifespan installations that don't even produce energy is possibly not the best use of our resources, considering it's almost all fossil fuel going into those logistics operations anyway, right? EROEI for a battery plant is going to be hard to achieve.

Thermal storage has very poor discharge rates unfortunately (usually slower than a day), as well as surprisingly high cost once you factor in inefficiencies and turbine cost

There's no conclusion or root cause in the article. It just suggests that since the Canadians had cost overruns and delays, it's impossible to build reactors on time and budget.

Yet China has managed to build those plants exactly around those costs and budgets - I have seen this argument so many time, around high speed rail, where Americans failed at infrastructure and deemed it 'uneconomical', then when China succeeded they smeared them for building probably in 'an evil way' or what.

Let me turn your question back at you - if China is doing so well on renewables, why is it that they're still building tens of gigawatts of nuclear capacity with hundreds more planned?

Even the linked article admits that 'Solar GWh' is not comparable to nuclear GWh because if you add the wattage of panels together you get a meaninglessly big number.

If you are planning around a 24/7 available power source, you need to overbuild solar by 20x I estimate, and the article admits, their calculations do not take storage into account (which you simply would not need if you had an always available power source.

China leads on solar panels, equipment and batteries, yet they are the biggest investors into nuclear today, I think that says enough about solar (and wind) not being able to economically substitute for nuclear.

Also a different angle - economics. If you take 20 years to build a reactor, then the interest that investment assuming an 5% YoY, would be ~2.7x the original purchase price. Your yearly profits wont be enough to pay the interest at that point.

You are right - by these standards it makes no economic sense to build a nuclear reactor, but the standards only exist because of the positively lethargic Western work moral.