Existing nuclear has its place. Shutting down existing plants is incredibly stupid. Building new plants is way too slow and way too expensive. Unless we get some magic new tech. I'm glad Bill Gates is putting money into researching that, but in the mean time we have to work with what we have. The book I linked (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/electrify) has a good road map including nuclear.

To solar-ify the US, we'd need 40,000 square miles of land for panels, and one square mile for batteries. In a country with 3.6M square miles, that's not a ridiculous amount of land. We use far more than that for parking lots. And of course we'd use a mix rather than just solar, so we'll need even less land.