I appreciate that you recognize the hedge. This is how I think of it too now. Various parties have differing beliefs about what a world with >50% intermittent energy harvesting looks like, and how easy the energy storage issue really is to solve.

Nuclear in the West is in rough shape, but again the Chinese, Russians, Koreans, and even the Japanese are pretty good at popping them out on time/budget. They all have established supply chains and trained craftsmen. Korea, in particular, is amazing. They chose one design and standardized it and built a bunch of them. This is the model of success in nuclear.

For this reason, it worries me a bit that lots of small startup in the US are trying to build different reactors in relative isolation. This is not the kind of industry where that is likely to go well. It takes billions of dollars to get to first product.

I think the open source model is much more likely to succeed in nuclear. Most of the tech is commodity anyway, so finding a business plan around this shouldn't be overly challenging.

The guy who built Korea's nuclear industry just did a great interview where he basically said that the US taught him how to build nukes, they perfected it, and now he wants to partner with the US again to decarbonize effectively with standardized nukes. [1]

[1] https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung