Many of the wind/solar advocates, on the other hand, are strongly anti-nuclear. Given the state of the climate that just doesn't make sense to me. All these technologies have their own advantages, and we should use each where it's most effective.
Firstly, there is the traditional concern of the green movement with nuclear waste and nuclear weapons proliferation. Nuclear advocates say these concerns are misplaced because of nuclear technology innovations (although its not clear how close the new technology is to wide deployment).
Secondly, there is an economic and free-market concern. Nuclear power plants generally only get built in highly regulated, centrally planned electricity markets with a great deal of Government financial support.
The projects to build them, at least in modern Western states, tend to be complex, expensive and prone to overruns. These projects generally need the plants to run all the time with guaranteed rates for the business case to stack up.
This is entirely at odds with solar and wind, which are highly democratised -- your Aunty can put solar on her roof -- and even when deployed at 'grid scale' tend to suck the profits out of wholesale electricity markets, because they have the lowest short-run costs and always out bid other energy sources.
In deregulated electricity markets renewables plus gas beat nuclear on price. We need storage to push gas out of the market.
That's how we ended up with centralized generation and a grid in the first place--the initial roll out of electricity was highly localized, with factories, buildings, and blocks each having their own generators. Centralized + grid beat that architecture on reliability and cost.
So, the grid needs to be available with or without solar. Thus the "free market" concern is less of a differentiator than it seems on the surface.
This is a question about how distributed energy generation with battery storage shifts more and more loads to the edges of the grid, and onto private networks.
And then, relating to back to the question of whether nuclear is compatible with renewable energy, the question becomes how does this trend affect what technologies make the most sense?
Big expensive nuclear makes a lot of sense in an environment where all the loads are on are centrally managed and planned grid with either guaranteed rates of return, or steady wholesale electricity prices, but this is not what the future looks like.
More generation might move to the edges, but that is simply a factor that will be taken into account by the regulation and central planning.
There has to be central generating to meet demand that local generating fails to meet; but the choice of fuel source doesn't have any implications for "free market" concerns. Electricity is not a free market. For example, net metering is only an option for home solar because a federal law says it must be. In a free market, the central electricity utility could simply decline to purchase from edge generators. Or decline to connect home solar people to the grid at all.
Look at the situation with Iran for instance. Any development of nuclear there is viewed with extreme suspicion, even while we are trying to reduce global oil dependence.
If Iran was rolling out solar and building silicon foundries, we might get into trade disputes over it, but we are not going to be that paranoid about them purifying silicon as it generally does not go boom.
edit - anyone pro-nuclear power who is not pro-nuclear power for Iran should really think on this one. A solution for electricity generation that you are scared of people having is not a good general solution.
edit 2 - I am not meaning to dump on Iran here, is just that the Iranian situation with this has been making the most news recently.
And again, take a remote village. Give them electricity and decent internet. What happens? Their lives get a lot better, their opportunities grow. But focusing on government-centralized systems will continue to exclude them.
The framework that the U.S. is negotiating with Iran right now will allow them to continue nuclear activities that legitimately lead toward peaceful nuclear power.
In particular, check out Nate Lewis's Solar Energy 101 (https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca...) - In the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) where he makes a strong case that the only choice is Solar - not because it's a good one, but because there is nothing else out there that can meet our needs (And he spends a bit of time talking about Nuclear Energy, and why it comes up short).
Incoming solar hitting the ground is ~ 89,000 terawatts
At current conversion efficiencies and accounting for transmission losses, this translates to an area of about twice the size of Portugal spread out globally.