It is something you can work out a ballpark number for a given % of wind/solar and while not impossible it is really a big number. Way beyond what we will get out of actual chemical batteries by 2050, we need gigantic scale pump back hydro projects on top of that. Trillion dollar range. So Nuclear may be less daunting, expensive as it is.
If you plan for a 100% renewable grid what you do is that you use different types of storage for what they're good at. Batteries can play a role in short-term storage, but for seasonal storage they're clearly not a good choice. Electrolyzers and H2 gas peaker plants (or maybe ammonia instead of H2) look like the most promising option.
I wish more people knew this, because all this "I calculated how many batteries you'd need for your renewables, we need nuclear!" clearly is neither an informed take nor helpful.
Not a realistic solution. We can do more, faster and cheaper with renewables. If you can't get to 100% with renewables, nuclear should anyway be the last option.
This would work well in denser-populated parts of the US, like northeast, and would be harder in Midwest.
Industrials need steady power to function. Without nuclear, the world is going to just use natural gas. Coal for poorer countries. Solar and wind peppered in but not trusted for any base load and regionally limited.
That's the thesis of the Tesla "master plan 3.0". It claims it will cost $10T to decarbonize the world, but that it would save $13T by doing so.
Tesla is obviously biased, but so is everybody else so might as well use a source where the biases are clear.