Furthermore, not only was solar power borderline non existent when those reactors were built, it is also still intermittent. You are just glossing over the biggest challenge of energy - balancing the powe grid. No-one needs energy if it's only avaliable at the wrong time. Energy storage multiplies cost of renewable electriciry several times over, and no country-scale grid has ever operated on wind and solar.
Lastly, energy is actually cheap - you can see that because we can afford transporting a pair of jeans 4 times across the world in the process of manufacture. We could have had zero-carbon grid since the 70s with nuclear - and France did. Even though France has cheapest energy in EU, suppose energy would be 30% more expensive. So what? We would be so much better off in terms of climate change.
24/7 365 grid scale battery backed and thus load following solar runs about 8c/kWh* which is cheaper than nuclear at high utilization. Sure, France’s model of importing and exporting significant chunks of electricity allowed them to ramp up nuclear, but they where exporting power at a loss and utilization still fell into the 80% range.
*Excluding the most northern and southern areas.
We are really talking about a handful of countries. The Nordic countries have cheap alternatives in hydroelectric, wind and geothermal energy. Nuclear may have a few niche applications for northern islands etc, but that’s not really significant globally.
PS: 4% of the UK’s electricity comes from solar and their southern tip is a actually quite decent for solar.
If just 10% of the resources poured into nuclear development, which is a cost no one that is pro nuclear wants to tally into the bill, were instead invested into solar energy, nuclear power would not have been able to compete with solar power by 1980.
Nuclear power isn't cheap, unless you ignore the insane R&D that was paid for by tax payers by government mandate and never paid back, unless you ignore the massive cost of construction long before one watt of power is produced, and unless you ignore the massive cost of decommissioning, and unless you ignore the never ending cost of spent fuel storage. It is entirely absurd that you believe once a spent fuel storage facility is built, the costs just disappear. The costs never go away. Maintenance. Security. Testing. It isn't free and it isn't cheap.
You keep repeating this idea thay uranium is expensive, by what metric? Where do you get the idea that its expensive?
If nuclear is so expencive, why does France have cheapest elecrticity in EU? And Denmark /Germany have invested in renewables have expensive electricity.
But you raise a decent point about what metric we should choose... I meant the cost of the stuff, but there are other metrics, such as clean up costs, because mining uranium is not clean. There is also a human health cost to populations within the proximity of the uranium mine.
French electricity is likely cheap because the French tax payers already picked up the cost of constructing spent fuel storage facilities and power plant construction, and they will ultimately shoulder the burden of the cost of decommissioning. This is just an educated guess, because that is usually how nuclear economics work. Otherwise, the investors that run the plants and sell the electricity would not be interested.
well, that's silly: sunlight is cheaper than uranium.
Also, nuclear fusion is possibly the cleanest energy source we could get. If we touch this, we might have a real path forward.