Solar is cheaper than nuclear power, faster to build, easier to deploy, easier to scale up and extend. Downside is obviously that one needs storage. But nuclear power is also not really suited for load following.
This is mostly a myth. The actual reason nuclear powerplants run at max power all the time is that nuclear fuel is very cheap compared to operating costs, therefore it is more economical to follow load variations on the other plants.
Here is an example of high-amplitude and relatively high-speed variation (10GW over a few hours) : https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1102625880520699911
What is true is there is little expertise in load following with nuclear powerplants because it is uncommon. Areva has been developing and exporting ALFC (Advanced Load Following Control) technology for automated load-following operations.
https://new.sfen.org/rgn/expertise-nucleaire-francaise-suivi...
https://www.powermag.com/flexible-operation-of-nuclear-power...
All in all, load following with nuclear is a technologically much easier problem to solve than high-scale energy storage.
The real (observed and useful) ability to follow load at a useful extent is offered by the float (tens of reactors simultaneously active => more flexibility towards tweaking limitations).
At this game nothing beats a gas turbine (hydraulic dams are serious contenders).
That's a common assertion on that topic, but it is baseless. In fact, nuclear plants are routinely used for load following when needed [1].
[1]: https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
The ability to load-follow is unrelated to energy price, but to grid stability. Regardless of what contract exists between a provider and a consumer, there is a third party, the grid operator, who can ask the generating parties to adapt their production to actual consumption.
> solar+wind + storage
Simply doesn't exist at scale currently. We don't really have good estimates of what a storage-balanced grid costs at scale, and we don't have the industrial bandwidth to build storage at scale with the current technologies.
To give you a back-of-the-envelope calculation, current estimates are that european countries relying on wind/solar would need 8 days worth of batteries to avoid most of negative-generation events. For a country like Germany which consumes 1.5TWh a day on average, that would be more than many thousand units of the large battery Tesla built in Australia.
As I said earlier, the theory may exist, but solving scaling problems isn't trivial, and is going to take some time.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/859104/hydrogen-producti...
Case in point: wind in Europe https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...
"the planned development around the North Sea means 100 GW (100 large power stations) would need to be turned on or off to balance out changes in wind power production when the weather changes. With a more cooperatively designed system, this could be reduced to just 20 GW across the continent.". Add solar, biomass... and storage, including a smartgrid enabling (for example) V2G: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid , then green hydrogen (boosting production units' output and reducing the amount of electric electricity needed).
It is so sad and so bad for our planet that for instance Germany decided to spend billions of billions on renewable energy plants while spending the same amount on nuclear power plant would made Germany zero emission economy.
The storage is limited only by tank size, and we already know how to store and use large quantities of hydrogen. The hydrogen produced from the process can be pumped elsewhere by pipeline and used as fuel for gas turbines to balance the grid, or combined with carbon dioxide or nitrogen from the atmosphere to produce zero net carbon methane and ammonia for use as denser fuel sources, or feedstock for industrial processes. You can even make zero net carbon synthetic jet fuel this way.
You're of course free to believe that countries will build 3 times the capacity of their energy production to compensate for that inefficiency.
* Currently a grid => hydrogen => grid round trip is 40-45% efficient.
* A grid => battery => grid round trip is 90-95% efficient.
You can recover 2x more energy by NOT using hydrogen. There is no competition. Unless the lost energy from green hydrogen production can be recovered somehow (co-generation)...
Many applications (transportation, industry...) can use it as such, without any way from hydrogen to electricity, and more and more probably will.
There are surprising new ways (offering an impressive efficiency), such as: https://www.slb.com/newsroom/press-release/2021/pr-2021-1118...
At a glance: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-el...
In-depth take: https://assets.siemens-energy.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:53...
But we won't need 3 times the amount - hydrogen will only be used to balance the grid. Most grid energy will come direct from renewables. Most of Europe would only need about 20 days' worth of hydrogen as insurance against a lack of wind or sun.
Green hydrogen has only become viable to replace hydrogen-from-fossils within the last few years as the cost of renewable energy has plummeted. That drop in renewable energy costs is what has changed recently and what has taken so many people by surprise.
I also don't think that "but what about space requirements" is an argument with enough weight to dismiss the long list of advantages given by the GP. We have so much unused space on roofs. We could get rid of a few parking lots if you're concerned for ground.
[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/worlds-uranium...
Power generation is only a small part of Germany's emissions. Germany would still be a large CO2 source with full nuclear power generation, just like France is because of transportation, food, heating, industry, etc.