Comment by cycomanic

> The thing people don't seem to have caught onto yet is that the combination of solar being cheap and solar not generating anything at night means that the price at night is going to be higher not just than it is during the day, but than it has been historically, because now whatever you're using to supply power at night -- regardless of what it is -- has to recover most of its capex exclusively at night. That's not great for nuclear but it's even worse for most other things. On top of that, the most competitive real alternative to nuclear there is natural gas, which doesn't work if you want to stop emitting CO2.

This is where you're wrong. That is the big problem for nuclear in particular. You just can't recover your capex during the night. The night is the low demand time anyway, and you are still competing with wind etc.. Nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors, because it's not economically viable. In fact operators even want to turn off reactors because even their running cost are too high (happened in Sweden, a while ago. IIRC the government wanted to turn it back on for political reasons).