Nuclear has serious advantages over renewables when you consider the physical constraints: to match a large nuclear plant solely with wind or solar, you’d need far more land, material, and backup or storage to deal with intermittency. Renewable sources can’t reliably deliver the same baseload without huge infrastructure and/or major reductions in energy demand. The trade-offs make nuclear almost unavoidable if we want to decarbonize quickly while keeping stable power supply.
Alternatively, renewables have the massive advantage of being distributed and often closer to the consumer, possibly even their rooftop, or their parking space, or even on top of their shading device (big umbrellas etc.), or their agricultural land, which is already suffering from the higher temperatures.
And price and time to market are of course giant points as well.
One often hears the pearl clutching about land area, but even in Europe the cost of land for renewables would be quite affordable. Building very expensive nuclear power plants to save on relatively cheap land would be penny wise, pound foolish, an optimization of the wrong metric.
With proper system design this becomes a non-problem. This adds cost, but done properly it's cheaper than a system based on nuclear, especially going forward as renewable and storage costs continue their relentless decline (at a pace nuclear could only dream of).
In more detail: you want two kinds of storage, one optimized for daily charge discharge, and one for long term storage, to handle different frequencies in the power spectrum of the power-demand mismatch curve. The first is batteries, and the second is various techologies (like thermal or hydrogen) that will be brought into play for the last 5% or so of grid decarbonization.
One can do modeling based on weather data, yes. There's even a web site where you can do that and obtain cost optimized designs (under various cost and technology assumptions): https://model.energy/
Nuclear proponents seem incapable of avoiding the exact same debunked arguments over and over again year after year. Did you know that the sun doesn’t always shine? Checkmate solar power! Bet you never thought of that. I am very clever.
> Were you ever worried about not having enough coffee?
Yet people are worried about delivery of oil and gas. The consequences of not having sufficient energy are more severe than a headache. I would not trivialise a life without electricity; how many people died in the Iberian Peninsular blackout?
Oil and gas and other fossils are finite resources, and we need to replace them anyway sooner or later with pure electrical solutions, better sooner, as we know. And then what I said applies. And, as the only "infinite" resources we have, are the sunlight and the gravity of the moon, it is obvious that we should base global electricity generation on them.
Yes, I looked into it. To store a few days worth of electricity I would need maybe 100kWh of battery storage. Right now I think battery storage costs around $100 per kWh. A whole season of electricity would be prohibitively expensive.
If fossil fuels are available and cheap, unburdened by the cost of their negative externalities, of course they will be chosen instead of a more expensive CO2-free alternative. That's what killed the nuclear renaissance in the US ~15 years ago.
What this means is there's low hanging fruit to solve these problems in other ways, once fossil fuels are no longer allowed to pollute without cost. There are already good ideas for solving the long term storage problem, with many of the component technologies already existing for other purposes.
Renewables and storage wouldn't drop gigawatts off the grid in an instant. They'd be massively redundant and distributed. That's how you get reliability.
