What exactly is the big gap? Are you going to mention baseload, a concept that’s been obsolete for a decade? The baseload power demand, according to the according to its actual definition, is zero on many grids. Solar and wind produce energy Joule-for-Joule far cheaper than fission. And we have any number of ways of storing that cheap energy. Renewables are the cheapest form of baseload power. It’s not 2010 anymore.

Plus, if we’re talking national security, we’ve seen from the Ukraine conflict that every nuclear plant is a huge geopolitical liability. There have been many near misses and scares relating to Ukraine’s fission plants. Many have had to be shut down due to the risk of being struck. And hell, Iran’s plants are actively being targeted by US and Israeli air strikes. In a big war, your enemy can create an instant chernobyl in your backyard if they want. You can design a reactor to be intrinsically safe, but that doesn’t help if someone drops a ballistic missile on top of it. And yes, if you did this to a nuclear power like the US or Russia, it might provoke a retaliatory strike with actual nuclear bombs. But there are dozens of countries that have nuclear reactors but no nuclear weapons. For them, having nuclear power plants is a huge strategic liability. Far better to have innumerable solar panels and wind turbines scattered across the countryside than one big vulnerable reactor, an Achilles heel that an enemy can target to knock your whole power grid offline.