> This gets repeated again and again, but wouldn't the money required to build/maintain nuclear plants be much better invested in building out renewables and battery storage? They already produce power much cheaper, and cost efficiency keeps increasing

Our power demands are increasing faster than we can build out renewables and storage.

Despite how much investment we are making into solar, wind, batteries, we're still burning more carbon year over year to make up for the demand for energy. We need a source of energy that can actually replace the base load carbon, not just augment it like renewables are. Nuclear is the most likely source to use for that purpose.

Edit: if we're being honest, we probably should have built out nuclear 20, 30, 40 years ago but we didn't. The expense now is kind of the cost of our poor policy decisions in decades past. We can continue to make poor decisions or we can learn our lesson and eat the cost now to fix those mistakes. I think failing to invest and shift to nuclear now would be yet another instance of passing the buck to the future generations, with even more interest