The reason people stopped building nuclear power plants in America is because solar is just plain more profitable and it's guaranteed money.
Guaranteed? In what sense?
Solar is more "popular" because its a significantly cheaper kilowatt than a nuclear plant (but still much more expensive kilowatt to petroleum energy), but its only that "economical" to scale in southern sun regions, not in places like the north (east, west, or central). Southwest solar is not capable of powering the entire nation, and you still have to produce electricity at night. There's no reason for the US to be stupid like Germany or China.
The problem with nuclear is still that keeping it safe is expensive.
Wrong. The reason why nuclear is so "expensive" is that its near impossible to build a nuclear power plant on a projected timetable because it gets litigated to death by anti-nuclear groups. This creates ridiculous delays which jeopardizes construction funding, because no capitalist enterprise can secure "cheap" lending without a ROI.
Furthermore, "expensive" safety comes from using 1970's nuclear plant designs, which are inherently costly. Start implementing modern nuclear plant designs using "molten salt" and make it a meltdown proof design (which can be done now), and diversify nuclear plants away from uranium/plutonium/breeder style designs to ones that reclaim "spent" 70% radioactive fuel, with more modular "small" plant designs (which we need to do anyway) and the redundant, unnecessary safety costs will go down as well.
The solution is for the federal gov't to "mandate" timely construction of nuke plants (subsidize lending, limit litigation timelines and state regulation of nuke plants), and rebuild the national electric grid to regulate electrical price rate charging. If a state wants to go nimby and prevent nuclear power plant construction in their state, fine. They can pay higher kilowatt rates (like 10x) from electricity from a nuke plant out of state. Or depend on cheaper solar energy from Arizona until "whoops" suddenly the state doesn't have power during the day. Its an infrastructure investment the US nation has to do, regardless whether the US "stays" with nuclear power.
Supposedly, the US currently generates 30% of its electric power from nuclear, but currently its doomed to go away as old plants decommission without replacement. Setup a (expensive) program to revamp nuclear plant construction (for the next 40 years) and rebuild the energy grid. The nation will have the ability to accelerate spending if the nation really goes electric transportation, and wants to move away from petroleum based energy production.