It is complicated, but actual professionals have looked into this with more depth than a random internet commenter who has a weird feeling that they have been lied to for years by the news sources they trust and isn't quite ready to accept they've been conned and just Google the answer to their own question.
When you are ready for that next step try LCOE and LCOES (levelized cost of energy / energy and storage) as Google terms to find more info or click this link:
LCOE calculated for intermittent sources (solar, wind) isn't really comparable with LCOE calculated for dispatchable or baseload sources (hydro, gas, coal, nuclear) though.
LCOE is (lifetime costs)/(lifetime generation), but the value of that generation is very different between intermittent sources and dispatchable sources and the difference is very important at grid scale.
For example, solar has become quite cheap -- when the sun is shining. At midnight the cost per KWh from solar is infinite. The cost per KWh for a coal plant, however, doesn't really change based on the time of day. This distinction isn't captured by LCOE.
That distinction is important because grid per-KWh costs are a weighted average of generation costs. Mathematically, that cost correlates nearly perfectly when most of the generation is supplied by baseload generation. LCOE and actual grid per-KWh cost correlates well when most of the generation is arbitrarily dispatchable. The simple numerical average LCOE correlates poorly to average grid per-KWh cost when much of the generation is intermittent if that intermittent supply doesn't line up well with demand.
For example, from your link if you want a solar system which provides power overnight, you need to sum up the generating cost (busy charging the batteries during the day) with matching storage cost. From your link utility solar ($30-$41) plus wholesale four hour (100MW/400MWh) storage ($131-$232) results in a "windless night" cost of $161-$273 which compares unfavourably with coal ($65-$152) and very unfavourably with gas combined cycle ($45-$74).
Yes, there’s this sztrqnge slice of the population that really loves nuclear power because it’s hairy and expensive and dangerous, and they seem to have trouble believing that renewables can do the job, so they now grumble about „what if it’s dark?“ but aren’t interested in answers. It’s FUD, essentially.
It’s not that simple. Questions on base load are legitimate even if storage and having a large grid alleviate the issue. Then in the case of solar there are the issues of both land usage and recycling in the context of an increasing demand. Nuclear is not a panacea. It has very good space used to power produced ratio and little but complicated to deal with byproducts. That’s why people like it. Anyway it is highly unlikely that the problem of power production will be solved with only one mean of production.
In the US, land usage is just about negligible as a part of the cost of solar. The PV equipment you'd put on an acre of land might cost $100K. The land itself? You can get it for $1K/acre or less in many places, even in the East.
Combine with wind, which often blows more strongly at night (look at the curves at ercot.com for Texas, for example), and use storage (both short term efficient storage for diurnal leveling and lower capital cost storage like hydrogen for long term leveling/rare outage backup). The estimated cost of getting to 100% renewables this way is higher than the levelized cost, but still looks like it will be cheaper than nuclear.
When you are ready for that next step try LCOE and LCOES (levelized cost of energy / energy and storage) as Google terms to find more info or click this link:
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...