Yes, but it turns out that when you stop building stuff (and intentionally hamstring other kinds of building for other reasons) you have to spend a bunch more treasure to figure out how to do it again.
We could have always just not stopped building them- done a reactor every 5 years just to keep that institutional knowledge alive- but that's too long-term for any modern democracy.
>We can build GW scale solar for a third of that amount already.
No. China can (by dodging all the regulatory hurdles we've so wisely imposed, of course), but we can't.
So we have 2 options- we can either pay 0.5x the money to China, gain zero institutional know-how, and in 20 years when the prices have quintupled need to re-learn how to build reactors anyway... or we can spend 1x now to do it up front, then never need to worry about that ever again, and as a bonus don't need to hedge our bets on future technology for storage.
Going with solar is irresponsible, and its TCO higher, when you're thinking beyond the short-term.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those anti-nuclear types. I'm just saying that the West has simply forgotten how to build nuclear powerplants without significant cost. It's so bad that when Abu Dhabi were choosing plant builders for their Barakah power plant, they chose KEPCO over every Western company. In fact, KEPCO won on all counts including timeline and cost efficiency. Their nearest competition was Chinese and Japanese, not even a single Western operator was close. Barakah is 5600 MW for 32 billion.
The Czech Republic has also recently selected KEPCO for building their new nuclear plant, 18 billion for 2000 MW.