Solar efficiency and cost has really only become economical in the last decade or so, and battery and inverter technology to make it practical for home use or grid interconnect about the same. Wind and hydro are location-dependent, and solar is somewhat also. Nuclear was vehemently opposed by environmentalists throughout the 1970s and 80s, they successfully stopped almost all new projects.
Solar only became "economical" (read: profitable) because a socialist economy dumped a huge amount of money into scaling it up without requiring it to be "economical". It could have been half a century or more ago if we actually cared.
Nuclear was not stopped by the environmentalists, it was stopped by the fact that it cost 4X more than coal at the time. You claim that solar wasn't profitable in the west, thus it didn't take off, surely you can also see that nuclear wasn't profitable in the west, thus it didn't take off as well.
The same country that invested the time and money to make solar profitable is also investing the time and money to make nuclear profitable, with nuclear reactors entering mass production...
It was never about "economical", it was about a system being mature enough to make long term investments. Ours simply can't do that anymore.
> Nuclear was not stopped by the environmentalists, it was stopped by the fact that it cost 4X more than coal at the time.
A big part of that is the insane culture of safety around nuclear. In a sane field like highway engineering or healthcare, you come up with the statistical value for a human life (or a statistical value for a quality adjusted life year), and then use that to make decisions about eg how much money to invest to make your highway a tiny bit safer.
Nuclear is forced to act as if the statistical value of a human life is pretty much infinity. While coal is allowed a finite and rather low effective value for a human life.
> It could have been half a century or more ago if we actually cared.
Interesting. What makes you think so?
Btw, just because China made solar cheap with huge amounts of effort doesn't mean that was necessarily the best use of those resources ex ante.
Just like going to the moon with Apollo wasn't necessarily a good idea. Nor do the wonders of computers justify world war 2.