China is already building between 6 to 8 nuclear power plants a year and plans to expand that number to 10 a year.
It's nothing compared to all the other sources of power they are creating, but it seems to me that rather than investing in mass battery storage, a few dozen modern nuclear power plants would be a good idea.
Assuming, of course, you can actually get costs down and cut through red tape like China can.
On the other hand they are building enough renewables to cover their entire electricity growth.
Even China has figured out that nuclear power is not economically viable.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...
Because no one cares about nuclear whilst the costs are so high, return on investment questionable and there aren't simple solutions for dealing with the waste. Plus for better or worse the politics of it are terrible.
Meanwhile every year solar and batteries are getting cheaper. And we may see a future with lots of EVs capable of being used as grid batteries.
It "helps" that nuclear is just so slow and expensive to get going that everything else just ends up looking pretty good. If it were cheap, fast and safe that would have been great, though.
In Australia solar is popular because it produces power at the same time it is needed for A/C, computers, manufacturing etc.
There really isn't the need for huge amounts of baseload power. Hence why batteries are used.
Because it was too expensive and took a long time to build. At least one utility in the US was forced into bankruptcy due to nuclear builds when power demand growth suddenly slowed during the long construction time.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
- CAISO forecast for today [1]: peak 28.8GW, low 21.5GW
- France forecast for today [2]: peak 52.7GW, low 35.5GW
[1]: https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook [2]: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-consommation-delectric...