this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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Nuclear power is good for its consistent output that is independent of outside factors like wind, clouds, or drought. Plus much of the cost of nuclear is tied with the construction of the plant not the operating costs, so a paid off plant isn't particularly expensive.
That consistent output isn't as useful as you think. Solar and wind are ridiculously cheap, so we would want to use them when they're available. That means winding down nuclear plants when those two spin up. I'm turn, that means those initial construction costs you mentioned aren't being efficiently ammortized over the entire life of the plant.
What we can do instead is take historical sun and wind data for a given region, calculate where the biggest trough will be, and then build enough storage capacity to cover it. Even better, aim for 95% coverage in the next few years, with the rest taken up by existing natural gas. There's some non-linear factors involved where getting to 100% is a lot harder than 95%.
The problem is that there are currently no good (cheap, scalable) technologies to store these large amounts of electrical energy.
Even current lithium-based battery storage is already cheaper than nuclear.
It does not make sense to compare the price of energy storage (lithium batteries), with the price for generating electricity (nuclear energy), or do you mean something else?
People have a hard-on about nuclear being "baseload" power and renewables being intermittent. Solar/wind plus batteries to add dispatchability is a valid comparison to nuclear if you only want to talk about baseload.