Applying naive market logic to this, as solar becomes a larger share of the energy supply mix, the price of energy at night will increase, making baseload supply more attractive. There's probably other effects that could complicate this, but it seems like a problem that could solve itself over time.
Again, the issue is cost, and externalities. On the one hand the cost of nuclear electricity is low, but the externalities are extremely high. Time, public opinion, and long-term liability are all against it (and that's assuming it goes as planned.)
Sure, optimal storage has yet to be figured out. Batteries and pumped-water-schemes are working in some cases, but are not necessarily grid-scalable [1]. But work in this area has potential, and we've not reached any maxima here yet.
Technologies like compressed air, hydrogen and so on are sll in their infancy.
I should note that I am pro-nuclear. It's a lot cleaner than coal or gas. I'm just not sure it'll ever be economically attractive.
[1] on a household level, batteries that can store over-night amounts of power exist, send are easily available. This provides a cap on how expensive night electricity can be.
I say this because there is a category of power consumers that is often forgotten by us mere mortals: industry. To produce the things we consume, all kinds of industrial plants and operations exist that we know little about, but that have gigantic power needs. Just one example (out of many more): metal processing. Or industrial fans, where one fan could need 5MW at a time.
All I‘m saying is, if you dig deeper and discover what power needs our society has, it is not straightforward. Peak demand, baseload demand, time of day, distribution networks to get it where its needed, location of primary sources (wind/solar/nuclear), etc. It is a difficult optimization problem.
It would, if it were easy and quick to scale up nuclear power. The story for scaling storage is much clearer, simpler, faster, and cheaper than building new nuclear supply.
Heat can be stored directly, without need for batteries - get a giant (like, 20ish metre diameter) tank of sand (or other thermal mass, but any crappy asbestos-riddled sand will work just fine), wrap it in a metre or two of insulation, and the cube-square law will ensure it stays heated for months when heated.
This has drawbacks such as not working well with heat pumps (if you need 1000C temps then heat pumps flat-out don't work, and if you cap your heat at lower then your construction costs go way up, not to mention giant heat pumps are expensive compared to resistive heating, so electricity prices had better be high enough to justify the investment), but they let you turn surplus intermittent renewables into on-demand heating for literally dirt-cheap.
If there's any sort of battery crunch, then direct heat storage will win by virtue of being available and trivially deployed wherever there's a construction industry. It's very boring 20th-century (or 19th-century?) tech, and that's an absolute blessing, logistically.
By the way, wind is already getting close to nuclear’s share in the EU electricity mix. https://mastodon.energy/@matteodefelice/111335718838014650
It already does work though, and it growing exponentially without any tedious political debates since just about anyone can do it at any time, at any cost and any scale. Companies store their own energy, counties store their own energy, private individuals store their own energy.
I see no way of stopping it unless corruption somehow manages to make private power production and storage illegal. There certainly are no technical or economical showstoppers.
But this is not nuclear vs coal. Both are (imo) effectively dead, killed by economics, not politics. Solar is cheap. Storage has a lot of potential winners. Put together the long-term outlook for fossil or nuclear is not great.
Thought green energy was supposed to save us all money ?
Whatever is wrong or bad with batteries, nuclear is in some way worse.
The only economical way to produce nuclear power is as a side-effect of weapons production.
The biggest criteria for grid level storage is price to energy ratio. Cheap cost beats all, since size is not really a problem.
So i want to see molten sodium, or heat based storage, which uses cheap materials. Or have cheap electricity produce green fuels for storage and use long term (e.g., synthetic "natural gas" from CO2 capture).
I do believe nuclear has a place tho - diversification is security, but this might have to be subsidized rather than be naturally economically competitive.
You can stop your refinement process a lot sooner with nuclear power vs weapons.