> (Energy storage isn’t advanced enough to take traditional baseload offline
Because traditional baseload isn't a concept in a fully renewable grid - distributed storage and production naturally evens out demand and production, and also makes the grid more resilient to freak weather events (the kind we see more and more thanks to climate change)
> You’re not going to factories on Mars or asteroid belt mining operations with solar.
You're not doing them with anything at the moment so whats the point of conjecture. You really think that energy is the biggest concern over, you know, the colonisation of space?
So when do we turn off the giant nuclear reactor in the sky we don't understand and might evaporate the planet if something goes wrong?
There is no such thing as 'no harmful side effects'. We can put our head in the sand and pretend that the universe is a friendly place for life and go extinct in the next 100k years or so. Or we can acknowledge that there is no such thing as 'nature' and make the universe fit for us.
Right now reliable baseload can be provided by renewables plus gas fired turbines for intermittent supply much cheaper than nuclear.
http://www.energyscience.org.au/BP16%20BaseLoad.pdf
If the argument is that we want nuclear power on Mars, then sure, that seems a reasonable position to take.
Why would you compare nuclear, which is 100% green, to 'renewables + gas + batteries' which is far from green energy?
It's much better than coal, and can be migrated to incrementally (which is much easier than the huge up front investment in nuclear).