> 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.

NPPs that small are a nonstarter, due to loss of economies of scale. Even SMRs are creeping up in size now to try to recapture the economies of traditional gigawatt power plants.

Your shipping container mention reminded me of The Box, a book that explains how shipping was so erratic, risky, slow, unreliable and incredibly expensive before the standardization into containers. Containers literally changed the world economy.

I think you are onto something. But this requires upfront investment, which alas, politicians are not for.