Nuclear is in an awkward place. All of the proven last gen designs are considered too risky to build new now. But it also seems that the next gen designs are not proven at all in terms of construction timelines or buildability. For example, many next gen US nuclear projects were canceled after continuous schedule and budget overshoots. The completed next gen French reactor in China, for example is showing unexpected behavior and has been temporarily taken offline for review, and other next gen French design builds are, like the US designs and projects, behind schedule and over budget.
That's just the direct industry. The support industry for nuclear plant construction materials has also lost maturity and scale between first gen and new gen, as evidenced by the failure of upgrade materials in the So Cal Edison San Onofre plant. This is after decades of investment.
Because its so much less complicated to scale, my bet is on storage before any next round of new nuclear plants are built at scale. But we don't even need that much storage in the next decade, we mostly need far more renewable energy acceleration in very proven and fast, reliable rollouts.
Nuclear has never decarbonized an entire industrial economy, so by that definition, nuclesr is nkt "proven technology".
It probably could have, if you priced carbon appropriately 50 or 60 years ago, but no one did so cars and various industrial processes never made the shift and other random things like cow burps it cant even theoretically fix.
Now it's too expensive to bother trying even for the bits it's suited to.
Ironically, the main thing that wpuld make nuclear cheaper, would be cheap energy storage as youd only need to uild enoigh plants to generate the average yearly demand and use tge storage to handle the varying loads.
And if you wanted to power the world with nuclear, you'd need breeder reactors or seawater U extraction. Burner reactors powering the world would go through a megaton of natural uranium each year.
Even if we ask South Korea to please build us world of nuclear, it would be long time before uranium would be an issue - it is very small part of overall price.
I'm not aware of any nuclear power plant anywhere having been fully decommissioned, with all waste safely stowed away, safe from earthquakes and plane-crashes.
As far as I'm aware, even the 1st-generation MAGNOX reactors in the UK have longer to go to full decommissioning than the time that's passed since they were built.
"Proven" doesn't just mean "deployed at scale"; it also means "fully decommissioned". It's not fair to claim that nuclear is "clean", while leaving it to future generations to figure out how to actually clean up.
Nuclear has track record of decarbonizing entire industrial economy in just 10 years.
We dont have storage solution with such track record.