For anyone interested in more depth, the full report linked in the article is worth looking at. In general, it's not been a good year for the industry. Uneconomical plants in operation, stalled and cancelled projects, criminal fraud and theft of public money, and the unsolved problem of how to decommission anything plague the business. If the real costs were addressed, it seems many more plants would have shut down by now. The report does a great job of linking to original sources and it would be hard to find fault with the facts in it. TLDR, nuclear is in decline worldwide and maybe completely over in the US as far as new construction. The proposed new modular reactor designs have safety issues that keep them from being a quick fix.
I guess I don't understand how nuclear power can run a submarine but can't be harnessed to provide power on land. Nuclear power seems to work pretty well in ships. It seems as if we're not framing the problem correctly.
Submarine, aircraft, and icebreaker reactors usually operate on military-grade fission materials. You don't want those to be exported all over the world. And a bigger reason is that they simply can not compete with bigger plants. 1 GW class nuclear reactors generate much cheaper electricity even after factoring in their huge CAPEX. There is one example of using a small nuclear ship-scale reactor for civilian power generation in Russia [0], but I would say it's a very edge scenario, not applicable to the most of the world.
Money is no object when making a military submarine that doesn’t have to surface to resupply batteries with diesel generators. Makes for a hard comparison to at-scale public utility construction.
TLDR: Based on opportunity costs and urgency, renewable generation capacity is both much quicker and cheaper.
However, we must also invest (R&D) in next generation nuclear. eg micro reactors and liquid sodium. And hope like hell that any of the 50 long shot bets wins biggly. Because we're still going to need it.
