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Specifically regarding EROI, this makes it sounds like you're calling for continuing to use fossil fuels.
I disagree, the politics are too fucked and the regulatory environment too insane for cost to be a reliable predictor of viability. As I said, the price of uranium is practically a rounding error in plant operation, so France's uranium deal, whatever it was, is basically irrelevant. Actual fuel, including all the expensive processing and assembly which is unaffected by raw uranium prices, still only accounts for something like 20% of a plant's costs. Obviously I am not arguing for having no regulations, just that there might be a rational middle ground between "dumping radioactive waste in the local primary school playground" and the current status quo of "store all of it in the least efficient possible way." We actually created a facility specifically for this, and then just decided not to use for essentially no good reason.
However the recent regulations definitely strangled the industry. The lack of any clarity as to permitting, approvals, and timelines made capital investment impossible. It just isn't possible to underwrite a billion dollar project without some assurance that it won't be litigated for multiple decades, or ultimately rejected halfway into construction. As has been discussed in other contexts, allowing indefinite project blockers is usually sufficient to make it a soft rejection. There is no scientific or practical reason that the law needs to be so ambiguous and burdensome. As I said, it has recently improved and some of the first new reactors since the 1970's have finally started to come online.
However, it's unlikely new reactors will "solve all the energy problems we're facing"* because fossil fuels still exist and will still be cheaper.
Actually, the opposite - continuing to use fossil fuels is impossible, because there's a finite amount of them and you eventually run out. But worse, because humans tend to extract the easiest, best resources first, the energy return and economic viability of them will go down well before we actually run out.
And if fossil fuels are the only energy source capable of powering modern civilisations, then when you remove that energy source without replacing it with something better/equivalent you end up without modern civilisations - there's no inherent law of the universe which says that modern western lifestyles are a permanent fixture of reality. You don't end up in Mad Max land (we had civilisation before we had fossil fuels after all) but you do end up with a society very different to the one we have now.
I will believe that this problem has been solved when those reactors are functioning and supplying us with electricity - but people have been saying similar things for the past decade, and nothing has happened. Again, these advanced reactors have been on the verge of solving the energy crisis for the last 50 years, so I'm not exactly holding my breath.
Climate change is going to cause vast amounts of economic damage as extreme weather events increase and climate belts slowly head north. These changes are going to encourage much more energy usage precisely at a time when that energy usage makes the problem worse - and the source of that energy is starting to run dry. The transition from fossil fuels to a new mixture of energy is going to cause lots and lots of economic pain on top of having to deal with massive amounts of pollution and changes due to global warming. There are going to be climate refugees as water systems change location, good farming land moves around (Siberians are probably going to be pretty happy though) and some places simply become unliveable. We need to find a viable alternative to fossil fuels, and in order to have a gentle transition to a society that uses that alternative we need to find it several years ago - which means that we aren't going to have a gentle transition even if we do manage to find something.
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