You're saying $120/MWh like it's a bad thing. The current average price for electricity in the US is $166/MWh as of March 2023 [1]. In sunny San Diego it's $475/MWh.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
[1] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
We need to compare solar and wind to these SMRs with the desired output characteristics. How acceptable is dropping the output for 10 hours each night, and lose 50% of your max output during long periods? If that's ok for your application, Solar without storage is probably the perfect solution. If you 99.99 of your time to be at a certain output level, all year round, solar is going to require overbuilding, and a weeks worth of storage (which changes the costs per MWh considerably).
Likewise, if you need a lot of heat for your application, solar is not going to be as good as an SMR.
The best technology is most likely going to be different depending on the use case. SMR would operate in a decently sized niche in our current world. What is not clear to me is how big this niche is, and how quickly it will shrink as gridescale storage tech becomes more economical.
We can look at the cost of providing steady power (synthetic baseload) from renewables + storage. This is the most favorable comparison for nuclear, since any varying demand enables storage to serve double duty (smoothing variations in both supply and demand). For reasonable cost assumptions, particularly for when any nuclear plant started today could come online, renewables beat nuclear. It's important to use more than just batteries for storage; batteries are not well suited to long term storage.
> Levelized cost already takes into account the capacity factor of the sources. On a per-peak watt basis, PV is 10x cheaper than nuclear.
You sound like you know what you are talking about, so I presume that you know that one of the limitations of Levelized cost is that it doesn't control for "time effects" which was the entire thrust of my comment.
> We can look at the cost of providing steady power (synthetic baseload) from renewables + storage
Yes, that's what I suggested is a fair comparison.
> any nuclear plant started today could come online, renewables beat nuclear. It's important to use more than just batteries for storage; batteries are not well suited to long term storage.
There are a lot of unstated assumptions/conditions here. Do you have any references I can read?