And we also have examples of France's Messmer plan. And the US nuclear boom during the 1970s. But I'm sure you're prepared to hand-wave away these examples, too

And we also have examples of France's Messmer plan. And the US nuclear boom during the 1970s. But I'm sure you're prepared to hand-wave away these examples, too. Countries have built nuclear power beyond 80% of total energy consumption in the case of France. Over 50% in the case of Belgium, 40% in the case of Sweden, and 22% in the case of Korea. Nobody matches matches France with renewable energy. The closest is Denmark with 42% wind power generation. Germany is the only large country with substantial renewable generation (other than hydroelectric or geothermal power), generating 25% of its electricity from wind with a further 9% from solar, but that still adds up to less than 40%. You insist that the market favors renewables, but the share of electricity generation demonstrates otherwise. Those costs are indeed of historical interest. In particular, when we analyze the cost history we see a clear pattern that serial construction of nuclear plants is cheaper than one-off construction. Production chains for nuclear equipment can leverage economies of scale. We have historical precedence for this relationship between number of plants built and individual plant cost. You're right: nuclear power wasn't killed by regulation. It was never cost competitive with fossil fuels, and interest in climate change wasn't very strong back then. And when the pace of building nuclear plants diminished, individual plant costs increased. > You have linked to a solar + storage + transmission solution, not needing any nuclear. Are you sure that's what you were wanting to link to? I'm fine with that solution. Note that the "three weeks of storage" there would be better done with hydrogen than with batteries. And how much hydrogen electrical storage do we currently have? Again, this solution involves technologies that we have no experience working with at scale. I'm sure these cost estimates are very competitive - just like how analysis predicted nuclear would be cheaper than fossil fuels before we had experience building nuclear plants at scale. These cost estimates exclude the cost of overcoming emergent engineering challenges. Which is a more reliable prediction? * Predicting cost of a project based on what it cost to build the projects of the same scale in the past. * Predicting the cost of a project based purely on educated guesses, or based on small-scale experiments.