I'd be curious to know if it also includes a "true" nuclear catastrophe insurance price or (as is more common) if theyre assuming the taxpayer will fund 99.5% of a Fukushima-type $800 billion cleanup bill like in US/Europe.
In other words, if we run a nuclear plant and deliberately induce a, as you say, "Fukushima-style cleaup", we are about comparable.
That's how expensive proper storage is. "Storage will save us", is frankly, an irresponsible lie that has killed.
(Obviously some form of storage would also be necessary for nuclear power which cant adjust output to match variable demand).
It is pretty cheap to build pumped storage, relatively. Pumping water uphill isnt too complicated. Until a few months ago though the cheapest "battery" was still natural gas.
Pumped storage is an unsexy 100 year old technology and it doesnt have a huge lobby doing public relations like the nuke industry so when big projects go ahead we tend not to hear about it but there are tons in the pipeline all over.
There isnt a shortage of up. The geography to make it work isnt rare:
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-spot-530-000-potenti...
Pretty much the only place without suitable geography in the US for pumped storage is Florida.
In Europe hydropower in the alps is already being used as a giant battery.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
[2] https://www.iaea.org/projects/crp/i12007
[3] "Achieving the lower end of the nuclear SMR range requires that SMR is deployed globally in large enough numbers to bring down costs available to Australia." (linked GenCost Report, page 58)
All nuclear powerplants are cheap and free from accidents when they only exist as Powerpoint reactors. Reality has had a tendency to change that.
Not all reactor designs are Chernobyl, Fukishima killed far fewer than the Tsunami that triggered it.
Small reactors have a long less than public reactor in submarines and elsewhere and have failure modes that are less destructive than larger scale early generation nuclear plants.
If those small reactors are cheap and the industry agrees to assume full liability for whatever goes wrong Id be impressed but I could see nuclear fusion taking off before that ever happens.