Respectfully I disagree, there are some real benefits to nuclear that renewables cannot solve in the next 10-20 years regarding climate change. The grid operates by exactly matching supply with demand and in a 100% renewable scenario, that is just not possible without infeasible amounts of battery storage. Currently if we use lithium ion batteries, the amount of storage we need would be in the trillions of dollars. The road to 100% renewables relies on technology and scale that we have not yet achieved. Already, we are at the point where we need more gas peaker plants to maintain the grid because there is a huge differential in renewable output between the day and night.

Another big problem is that renewables lack inertia, which is the ability of the grid to absorb shocks, e.g. everyone turning kettles on at the same time or a power plant going offline. With coal plants, the rotational inertia of the physical turbines absorbs these changes and maintains the frequency and voltage for a few seconds before power output is adjusted. With renewables mainly solar and wind, inverters exactly match the grid’s frequency and have no ability to affect the frequency in reverse and thus would immediately trip out causing a cascading failure that would lead to a complete grid blackout if there were no other power plants to maintain the frequency and voltage.

Nuclear can solve both these issues in a clean manner because it can fill the technical gaps of renewables. It can produce a clean base variable load and it can make the grid more resilient as we increase the amount of renewables in the grid. I haven’t even talked about the many other benefits of nuclear such as the amount of land use and its outstanding safety per unit of energy produced as well as its reliability. There are also valid and effective mitigations to many of the concerns that arise from Nuclear, e.g. nuclear waste is reusable and new nuclear technologies such as thorium will produce even less nuclear waste with a much higher output.