Nuclear has the opposite problem as solar in that it needs high uptime 24/7 to stay reasonably economical. You can easily design a grid following reactor as seen with nuclear subs etc, it just doesn’t save you any money.

24/7 365 grid scale battery backed and thus load following solar runs about 8c/kWh* which is cheaper than nuclear at high utilization. Sure, France’s model of importing and exporting significant chunks of electricity allowed them to ramp up nuclear, but they where exporting power at a loss and utilization still fell into the 80% range.

*Excluding the most northern and southern areas.

I'll respond to your straw man. It isn't about the energy within the thing, the exorbitant cost of Uranium is in mining and refining. No one said anything about coal, but it doesn't need refined, and is cheaply mined... but you've also made a false equivalency, because coal isn't the only competition to nuclear. The sun just shines, wind just blows, water just flows, and the geothermals just produce heat, without any investment or refinement.

If just 10% of the resources poured into nuclear development, which is a cost no one that is pro nuclear wants to tally into the bill, were instead invested into solar energy, nuclear power would not have been able to compete with solar power by 1980.

Nuclear power isn't cheap, unless you ignore the insane R&D that was paid for by tax payers by government mandate and never paid back, unless you ignore the massive cost of construction long before one watt of power is produced, and unless you ignore the massive cost of decommissioning, and unless you ignore the never ending cost of spent fuel storage. It is entirely absurd that you believe once a spent fuel storage facility is built, the costs just disappear. The costs never go away. Maintenance. Security. Testing. It isn't free and it isn't cheap.

> Uranium itself is much cheaper than coal / any fuel per unit energy.

well, that's silly: sunlight is cheaper than uranium.