"Nuclear energy already accounts for nearly 40% of electricity generated by the North Carolina-based utility company, and Good said the company sees no way to reach net-zero emissions without the power source weighing heavily in its energy mix.

Well, Bob, you know USA better than I, however, we both know that major parts of the entire USA do NOT have electricity 24/7, leave alone /365. Larger parts of USA does not even have anything which could be called a grid. 

The entire idea about large scale grids came from a desire of centralizing the energy production such that the profit also could be controlled by a few handful people.

When you now say that these people cannot see any way to zero emission without nuclear, then let me remind you, that Nuclear is far from Carbon free. If you use the ISO 14060 standard for evaluation of carbon emission, you know that you can take the construction cost - all of it - and transform it into CO2, directly, based on a formula going: 1 USD => 2.3 kilogram CO2. You also know that you thereby have the base-price of anything - whether it is a vehicle, a house, a nuclear reactor, a mobile phone - converted to CO2, that way. 

The result of this is, that the base price of nuclear power, which is USD 0.09 for the best of these stations (then you add profit on top), is based on the LCOE for 60 years of operations. Therefore, you can take the entire CAPEX - USD 7300 per kiloWatt - and convert it directly into CO2. Therefore, Nuclear power is not at all - far from - blatantly - not CO2 free. Let's be practical - the improvement of one of the most recent nuclear reactors, in Britain, was a 3 GigaWatt construction which so far has been costing 22.5 Billion GBP (was that in 2018?). Therefore the evironmental cost of this construction is equal to 22.5 * 1.36 * 2.3 = 70 Million tonnes of CO2. On top of that comes operations, which are at all not CO2 free. The cost of Uranium, subsequent storage of it for 500 years, with maintenance and all that - plus the maintenance of the entire nuclear power station for 800 years while it "cools off" - that is - the short term fission products wanes off in danger - costs a substantial amount of personnel, with vehicles etc. etc. - 

Bob, you have been infatuated with Nuclear power for quite some time, and unlike the general popular interest in this futile nuclear technological disaster it is, your infatuation seem not to wane. 

I am surprised to find you here, more than a year since we last discussed nuclear versus everything else. 

You are advocating that nuclear power is clean power. You could be sued for that statement, because since last we spoke here in Energy Central, many events have happened, which means that Nuclear Power is slowly but surely sliding down the ranking of preferred power sources.