If we need to resort to demand shaping (read: turning off the power) then the cost of that needs to be accounted for. If you only run your smelters, chemical industries, etc. for part of the year then the cost of those commodities, and by extension every product using those commodities, gets more expensive. Increasing the cost of steel by 30% because we can't power our arc furnaces all year round is a massive cost that isn't captured when you just look at levelized cost of generation.
What form of storage are you referring to? The only popular forms of storage are batteries and hydroelectricity. The former isn't produced in nearly enough quantities, and the latte ris geographically restricted.
Your straw man is still too strong for you to push over.
Only a small fraction of the arc furnace's power needs to be provided as electricity. A large fraction of it is a reducing agent like carbon or hydrogen which -- shockingly enough -- can be stored as carbon or hydrogen. Your imagined 30% increase due to idle capital is on top of a 50-80% reduction due to lower energy cost.
In industries where energy is the dominant cost, then minor shifts in production methods to do high labour tasks during low energy periods and vice versa will happen regardless of whether nuclear energy is available, because building solar to reduce costs and ignoring the nuclear reactor will still be a cheaper option than buying all of your energy from it. Alternatively the plant does buy the nuclear energy, but only when the sun is not shining because building their own array to use in DC mode costs $10/MWh and the VOM costs of nuclear are $15/MWh.
The only out is mandatory payment to a utility or funding it entirely with public money to everyone's detriment.
>If we need to resort to demand shaping (read: turning off the power) then the cost of that needs to be accounted for.
Of course, but the amount of low hanging fruit in this regard is A) ridiculously high B) zero, according to the nuclear and carbon industry models (they think demand cannot be shaped and only expensive batteries can deal with intermittency).
>If you only run your smelters, chemical industries, etc. for part of the year then the cost of those commodities, and by extension every product using those commodities, gets more expensive.
If you produce 2x as much as normal aluminum on a Tuesday when it's sunny and 1/5th as much on a Wednesday you've created more aluminum.
The solar driven smelter can produce more at a much lower cost because electricity is such a large % of the overall product.
There are plenty more applications like that where 5x cheaper electricity that "decides" when you use it is way better than 5x more expensive electricity that you can use any time.
What form of storage are you referring to? The only popular forms of storage are batteries and hydroelectricity. The former isn't produced in nearly enough quantities, and the latte ris geographically restricted.