In France, 70% of the electricity is nuclear, 15% is hydro, pumped by the excess nuclear power generated at during the night.
Now for your arguments:
1. Wind goes from 0 to 50mph at sea. No reliable wind corridor exists. Even if Market Street in San Francisco makes me think otherwise frequently :)
2. The concept of wind proliferation has been debunked, at least on the European level. We built a network between Denmark, Germany, Portugal and Italy. It doesn't work.
3. If you don't have wind, putting 3 wind turbines won't help you more. Germany learned it the hard way where their CO2 emission flat lined since 2009 instead of going down despite their all in on the wind and solar energy. If you install 3 times more than what you need, you also have the side effect of making your renewable energy 3 times more carbone intensive. It kills solar as a viable, scalable option for instance.
4. Yes that would be the required breakthough to change the game. Right now batteries production pollute way too much and cost too much to be climate efficient.
Do you have either a non-paywall version of that article or an alternative article with a similar view? I'm curious what it says, but I can't read it with the paywall in place.
Are we anywhere near the limits of what can be done with time-of-use pricing? If we flatten the "duck curve" then nuclear is a good match.
Variation in renewable energy generation can be reduced by averaging over larger geographic areas. Wind speeds and cloud cover vary much more on local scales than on continent-wide scales.
A combination of demand adjustment and linking of power generation over large geographic areas can reduce the need for energy storage.
We would need to develop a wavesomethingreactor which doesn't exist yet.
Nuclear will not solve our problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
If Fukushima was in New Yersey the USA would have lost New York City.
If global warming is as certain and as dangerous as what's being claimed, the risk of contaminating a few thousand acres (or even miles) with radioactivity is certainly worth it to save the world.
Plus Fukushima basically disproved the China syndrome scare we've been fed for 40+ years.
That's 10sqkm that's been lost basically forever, or as long as it humans require solar power for only 648MW during the day when the sun is shining.
Fukushima Daiichi was 5,306 MW and generated that 24hrs a day.
[1] https://www.originenergy.com.au/blog/5-largest-solar-farms-i...
Michael Shellenberger is one of my favorite writers on this topic. The radiation around Fukushima is less than the naturally occurring radiation in Colorado.
And storage for renewables is a last resort. Instead of storage:
1. build in areas with reliable winds (offshore trade winds)
2. better interconnection ("the wind is always blowing somehwere")
3. over-provisioning. If you build 3 times as much wind power as you need, it's still a lot cheaper than nuclear and you need a lot less storage.
4. storage. It's expensive, but if you did 1-3 correctly, you don't need much of it.
Nuclear is safe, but it's also crazy expensive and takes decades to build.