I definitely share your frustration… That said, there is some progress - see e.g. The price caps on insulin put in place this year, or the ACA reaching a bit further back – and I think it’s worth recognizing (and recognizing how we got it). Still a very long way to go and it’s an uphill battle unfortunately.

Or you could… Actually read the entire source you linked? It’s a pretty good article and goes into a lot of detail on why LCOE estimates vary significantly between countries and depending on discount rate assumptions, so quoting one specific number is useful context but not the full story.

The problem isn’t whether the LCOE numbers you quote consider the capital costs - they do, and that’s correct - so do the ones in the table below it. It’s that those are average values taken from the USA, which has among the highest capital costs for installing new reactors in the world. At best that tells us that fusion isn’t cost competitive in the USA right now.

If you scroll down literally like. A paragraph past that you will see a very nice table showing the spread of nuclear costs. Some (including in the US, which is used for the EIA figures) are quite expensive, but others (notably South Korea) are very much cost-competitive or better than renewables. Also worth noting, the renewable estimates have spread themselves, and do not include overinstallation/storage required to behave as firm power.

Which is to say:

A - there certainly are quite a few places that nuclear doesn’t make sense, at least currently. Including the US

B - equally, there are a lot of places around the world where nuclear is competitive

C - we should perhaps look at why the US is so expensive relative to other countries; it’s not some law of nature, we can change it. And it’s probably not just because other countries under-regulate them (I’d buy that for some of the countries listed)