The memes of the climate

Nuclear, like all things do, requires investment and scale to bring the cost down. Investment is necessary for iterative innovation that reduces costs, and after Chernobyl, the west at large more or less stopped building nuclear reactors. That means the past +30 years in nuclear has been more or less stagnant, so maintenance and build costs go up as everyone trained to build and work on them either moves on in their career or retires. It's a big reason why the US dumps so much money into oil, agricultural, and military spending and subsidies. Not just to funnel money to donors, although that is a big part of it, but because that industrial capacity is a national security priority. Once you lose it, it's a lot harder and a lot more expensive to get it back, with no good alternative in the meantime. That is what happened with nuclear.

And we are only now starting to see if the next generation of SMR (small nuclear reactors) can bring the cost down. Standardizing the production of smaller units that are much faster to make and deployable in more places will go a long way. Before, every single nuclear reactor was more or less bespoke, because a certain large enough size reactor grants enough operational efficiencies that it made much more sense to build large reactors with public funds to service a large area. But now government doesn't want to make those kinds of big investments anymore, NIMBYs everywhere don't want it built near them, and that is a long term strategy that requires long term commitment and public acceptance of nuclear to pull off.

As for why we need it, well, batteries are expensive and environmentally harmful to produce and very limited in supply. Renewables are intermittent and often unpredictable, and the grid demands a base load of power. Increasing efficiencies on the demand side requires public buy in and a whole lot more effort, like better insulating everyone's house. Hydro is also ecologically not great, not suitable everywhere, and demand for power tends to spike at the exact time that it is most useless - during hot dry droughts. Nuclear is the only thing that can replace fossil fuels for the purpose that fossil fuels fill in heavily renewable countries. Germany for example shut down their nuclear reactors and went back to burning lignite coal, because wind and solar could not provide the electricity they needed. Their emissions went up in 2021 and 22, despite how heavily they are investing in renewables.