It is not just a misconception. It is a Big Lie, endlessly repeated, endlessly debunked. Continuing to repeat it makes one a Big Liar.

When you need to lie to make your case, you don't have one.

People started lying about nuclear power before it even existed: "Too cheap to meter", they said. Now with FOIA we have documentary evidence that they knew at the time it would always be a high-cost choice. But on the back of Red Scares and nuclear weapons tie-ins, they got and still get monstrous public subsidies, so we all pay, wherever we get our power.

In recent years, the agency that had once collected payments from nuke operators for waste placement has instead been paying out huge amounts to remaining operators, who pocket it.

The only bigger liar is fusion research. There, the only tech the feds will fund is hot-neutron fusion; that's the giveaway that it is really just a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work.

There will never be one lonely erg of commercially-viable Tokamak fusion. It can never even begin to approach competitiveness with solar + wind + storage, even without counting the enormous sunk cost of decades of $billions/year with nothing meaningful to show for it.

The continued hemmorhage of money for Tokamaks starves actually potentially-viable fusion programs.

The reason administrators like huge centralized projects like nuke plants always are is that they provide almost unlimited scope for corruption: steady, year-over-year corruption. Cost overruns are not accidental; they are the whole point of the operation.

Small modular nuke plants don't offer scope for as much corruption, so they would face an uphill battle even if they could be made compretitive. But even with huge subsidies and high pricing, they weren't competitive, nothing new has made them cheaper, and prices are still plummeting.