But if nuclear was getting even a fraction of the money that fossil fuels receives, we would be carbon neutral right now.
You harp on costs, but energy is _always_ expensive, and there is nothing, not even renewables, that will provide the amount of energy that we will need in the coming years anywhere near quickly or efficiently enough.
Nuclear will get cheaper like every other industry does once we create the actual market for it. Right now, we just have decades old reactors on shoestring budgets and scientific studies because _we didn't properly fund it_.
Electric cars alone are predicted to nearly double our energy grid requirements in the next few decades[1]. We're not moving anywhere nearly fast enough with renewables to account for the growth from those vehicles alone.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-weather-grids-autos-i...
And plenty of those alternatives are doing great in terms of funding, growth, and cost. Hundreds of GW of wind and solar came online during the last two years or so. Most of the projections for this market from only a few years ago were completely wrong and this growth has caught more than a few governments by surprise and prompted quite a few of them to move forward earlier announced dates to clean up the grids in their country. E.g. the UK is now talking about 2030 for this. There might be one new nuclear plant coming online in that time frame and possibly a few more might get built. But it's peanuts compared to renewables. At this point it seems more like an expensive vanity project for politicians than a practical solution to supplying energy.
Most of the challenges are actually not adding capacity but balancing the grid and moving energy around. Energy storage and cables basically. Grid infrastructure is where public spending needs to happen. There are a lot of countries that are actually slowing down renewable energy deployments because their grids just can't keep up. Most of the time when you see a wind mill not spinning it's not because it's broken but because it's been turned off because the grid can't handle the over supply. Kind of embarrassing for the companies involved. All that expensive kit and they can't handle the output.
Expensive nuclear plants that you can't turn off and on on demand are part of the problem here; not the solution. Mostly the hard choice grid providers have to make is turning wind turbines off or shutting down e.g. a gas plant. They both cost money whether they produce or not. Some grid providers even have occasional negative rates because of this: they literally pay consumers to consume more electricity. It's preferable to temporarily reducing capacity at great cost. That's why grid batteries are so hot right now.
IMHO current generations of nuclear technology are a bit of a dead end in terms of cost. But maybe somebody figures out a 10x improvement. Worth some public spending. Fusion is actually getting some traction lately and it seems that is starting to attract some serious money and there have been some breakthroughs reported recently.