Last year, North Sea wind parks produced at full capacity for more hours than french nuclear plants.
The advantage of nuclear is of course that to some degree you can schedule the shut-downs.
Solar will make energy production essentially free [1] at the time scales we are looking at. The price of renewable energy systems will be entirely in moving them through time and/or space to when the demand is. We need massive Hydrogen build out anyways to decarbonize industrial processes, so betting on Hydrogen storage for this purpose seems reasonable.
The thing for nuclear economics is this: People will build these solar cells anyways. So during summer/day time you can not sell your nuclear power. So nuclear power plants don't need to be cost competitive with Solar. They need to be cost competitive with hydrogen storage if you only operate them for a fraction of hours per year. Nobody has shown a viable economic path for this. The only benefit is that the technology is more proven than mass hydrogen storage and conversion. However, proponents always point to unproven future hypothetical technologies to bring down prices to make nuclear cost effective.
And nuclear waste disposal remains a problem as well.
> Solar will make energy production essentially free
It may end up being cheaper to just use PV to resistively heat large masses of rock and use that heat to drive turbines, instead of fissioning uranium to make the heat. Not that this would be the best way to do things, but it would be an illustration of nuclear's cost problem.
The advantage of nuclear is of course that to some degree you can schedule the shut-downs.
Solar will make energy production essentially free [1] at the time scales we are looking at. The price of renewable energy systems will be entirely in moving them through time and/or space to when the demand is. We need massive Hydrogen build out anyways to decarbonize industrial processes, so betting on Hydrogen storage for this purpose seems reasonable.
The thing for nuclear economics is this: People will build these solar cells anyways. So during summer/day time you can not sell your nuclear power. So nuclear power plants don't need to be cost competitive with Solar. They need to be cost competitive with hydrogen storage if you only operate them for a fraction of hours per year. Nobody has shown a viable economic path for this. The only benefit is that the technology is more proven than mass hydrogen storage and conversion. However, proponents always point to unproven future hypothetical technologies to bring down prices to make nuclear cost effective.
And nuclear waste disposal remains a problem as well.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices-vs-cumula...