So looking at the article it seems to be against small scale traditional (fission/boiler) systems. Which are fair game. They were pretty much outdated over 50 years ago. I would be more interested in studies on dispersed Thorium Reactors which held far more potential as little as a decade ago.

Nuclear technologies missed their window. The use cases where they are the best technical solution now are extremely limited, and that means you can get the investment going to improve them.

It’s a curiosity now.

I disagree, a bit.

Base load is still hard to get with renewables, unless you can get a somewhat consistent level of power from them. That’s basically just hydro/tidal and geothermal at this point, and all of those have very limited areas where they can be used.

Nuclear, on the other hand, can be built anywhere except my backyard.

“Base load” is not that much. Off shore wind is almost always blowing, and all the other renewables can be stored via batteries or hydrogen (or tanks, in case of biogas). Yes, that’s a whole lot of stuff, but the technology exists, can be produced on large scale and (most importantly) doesn’t cause any path dependencies.

Nuclear is extremely expensive, as the article highlighted. And to be cost effective, power has to be produced more or less constantly. Having a nuclear power plant just for the few hours at night when wind and sun don’t work is insane - and insanely expensive.

Nuclear is mostly expensive because of regulations and red tape that are mostly built upon FUD.

That needs to be re-addressed from the ground up. There needs to be a big PSA push on the safety of nuclear and on the true costs and hidden dangers of coal and oil plants, and then we got to fix the outdated regulations.

Sorry, but we’ve seen what happens when you build nuclear reactors in a low regulation environment under cost pressure.

It’s not pretty.