I'm not convinced enough people know that renewables are cheaper to make the latter claim you're making. For example, in some places as soon as renewables come online they get priority access to demand, and other fuel sources get the leftovers. That's still a subsidy, just by another name. So I don't know if they are cheaper.
Finally, the point about renewables isn't only cost, it's also reliability. The subsidy I just mentioned falsely obviates the need for renewables to be reliable from a cost perspective, but that doesn't mean that needing a high base load (and higher the more we move to electric vehicles) isn't the most important thing to supply.
And none of that is about people "not wanting renewables".
yeah, but fossil fuels get subsidies of all sorts, not just polluting for free, but even things like leaving the british taxpayer to pickup the bill for cleaning up old infrastructure they no longer need
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/25/british-tax...
The alternate explanation is that nuclear is a sick technology, and the Green movement is not responsible for its failure. Nuclear was so weak even a group as feckless as the Greens could have success against it.
If there's many billions of dollars in value to be created, that will trump anything a NGO can whine about. That's why we're still burning so much fossil fuel. Nuclear was vulnerable because it wasn't creating value.
Do you think lobby from fossil fuel companies just sat on their hands all this time?
As the article notes this price decline was predictable decades ago, but you can't really blame people for being dubious about predictions. Maybe the people who got it right were just lucky.
But since real actual installed wind and solar became cheaper a while ago, the people still openly arguing against renewables slide ever close to cartoon supervillain status.