Similarly, I'm not sure that for decisions in 2022-2050, we should be relying on lessons learned half a century ago in the 1970s about tech which was designed and deployed even earlier than that, during the absolute infancy of nuclear power tech.
Renewables are here and vastly cheaper. Steam based plants like nuclear and coal lost their competitiveness with the advent of the CCGT plants in the 80s. Both are dead simply due to their shared thermodynamic cycle. Renewables are pushing CCGT plants more and more towards only existing as peakers.
I am not sure why nuclear needs to be perfectly competitive to be a valuable option. Govts worldwide subsidize infrastructure programs to varying degrees. Roads are subsidized. Water treatment plants are subsidized. Hell, agriculture and farming cannot survive a free market without government subsidies in most of the planet. Companies like Apple and Tesla won't build manufacturing plants without tax breaks (effectively a subsidy.) Amazon won't build an office without asking for a tax break from the cities.
The expectations of nuclear are irrationally high.
And your quotes all point to policy issues which can be fixed with proper governance. Just because it "became" non-competitive 5 decades ago is no reason to not pursue it going forward given that any help against the climate emergency is welcome. Even IPCC in a report some time back accepted that meeting the climate target is not possible without the help of nuclear and in a good policy environment nuclear can be cost competitive.
Today you can use solar to produce hydrogen which you then burn and still economically come out ahead of nuclear. Not that it would be sane to do which is why it haven't been adopted.
There hasn't ever been a nuclear plant built which was not subsidized. Wind and solar needed a kick-start, now they bid to even get permission to build off-shore wind power.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]
> Over-commitment to nuclear power brought about the financial collapse of the Washington Public Power Supply System, a public agency which undertook to build five large nuclear power plants in the 1970s. By 1983, cost overruns and delays, along with a slowing of electricity demand growth, led to cancellation of two WPPSS plants and a construction halt on two others. Moreover, WPPSS defaulted on $2.25 billion of municipal bonds, which is one of the largest municipal bond defaults in U.S. history. The court case that followed took nearly a decade to resolve.[49][50][51]
> A cover story in the February 11, 1985, issue of Forbes magazine commented on the overall management of the nuclear power program in the United States:
> "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.[55]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...