If you want to argue that nuclear is affordable as non-baseload power, because the (non-economic) cost to the environment of the alternatives is otherwise too high.... well I'd disagree because of how far solar/wind/batteries have come in the last couple of years, but prior to that you would have had a point. And you still would as far as continuing to operate existing plants goes of course.
I'm not arguing that when taking environmental damage into account, that nuclear is cheaper than current solar/wind/battery technology for any single power project. They have the advantage of massive R&D over the last 30 years.
What I am arguing is that focusing on solar/wind/battery might not be the best route to 100% carbon free power in the long term. Maybe it is? But we really shouldn't be jumping to that assumption.
And we shouldn't be disregarding Nuclear because of any argument that can be summed up in a hacker news comment.
they either pick some pet peeves (coral reefs, rainforests, global South inequality, desertification) and usually start buying things (EVs, PV panels, heat pumps)
but when it comes to policy they usually revert to Greenpeace/degrowth/NIMBY cult members
And one option is to mass produce nuclear power plants, get prices down even further via economics of scale and then run them uneconomically.
Uneconomically doesn't mean "at a loss", just that you aren't making as much profit as you could optimally. With enough economics of scale, we can probably still run these nuclear plants at a profit, maybe even cheaper than natural gas peakers. But it doesn't matter, the goal is saving the planet, not profit.
It's not the only option, you can also build massive amounts of wind/solar/tidal and pair them with massive amounts of battery storage.
The third option is to build way more hydro power plants. Hydro tends to get overlooked as a form of green energy, because while it might be 100% renewable, you do have to "modify" a local ecosystem to construct a new dam. But hydro has the massive advantage that it can work as both baseload and demand load, so they can pair nicely with wind/solar/tidal.
I'm not even talking about pumped hydro (though, that's a fourth option to consider). Regular hydro can work as energy storage by simply turning the turbines off at letting the lakes fill up whenever there is sufficient power from your other sources.