Why bother?

What reason is there to believe a generator with blades attached to it is going to lose to a generator with a containment building and reactor attached to it?

Isn’t the issue that the windmill also needs a large battery to meet demand?

That is solar - wind can work through geographic distribution alone without so much as a potato battery. A local area may be becalmed by wind but since temperature differentials produce wind and the earth rotates into and out of the sun the only things which would lead to no wind render the power generation question a moot point.

Grid scale batteries make wind cheaper by allowing less overproduction but they do that for everything by assisting grid balance and acting as a form of high frequency trading which is productive in ways other than increased market liquidity.

Storage is needed, but storage has finite cost, and the cost is falling rapidly. Nuclear's window of opportunity is now closed.

Far from it. After years of promotion, investment and development, wind and solar energy prices dropped 10-20x in the last decades. Same cost reduction can very well happen with nuclear power, and it'll take far less space than solar and wind, will disrupt the nature less, and will be much more reliable and predictable, capable of producing energy on demand and not requiring any storage.

Nuclear had many decades in which its cost could drop. That failed to happen. Unlike with renewables, nuclear never had relentless cost decline. Its learning curve has even shown negative learning, with costs rising with time rather than falling. There's something about nuclear that just keeps it from getting cheaper. The scale and complexity of nuclear plants probably has something to do with it, and also the maturity of the non-nuclear side.

For the past 40+ years there was an non-stop ongoing attack on nuclear energy. See "china syndrome" for more info.

Fear-mongering is _the reason_ for the absence of progress and rising prices, not some technical obstacles.

Fear mongering must be incredibly powerful, if it has universally stopped nuclear from getting much (or at all) cheaper, everywhere in the world, in multiple cultures.

Much more plausibly, the technology itself is to blame.

All of that is irrelevant to the argument that wind wins because it’s simpler, which is what I was trying to engage with.

Yes-ish.

Although there are other options like pumped hydro (pump the water back up the hill) though clearly that has logistical limits.

Because it is cheaper to build many blades and posts. Plus economies of scale - wind is more factory scale in efficency as it is mostly assembly. The containment building alone is construction scale and is inherently pretty one off in requiring geology and planning as opposed to "look at weather patterns and slap it down".

I am personally of the point of view that if we went on a nuclear power plant building spree back in the day to replace coal plants/provide for growing needs and used breeder reactors to deal with waste we would be far better off. Renewables are cheaper per kWhr now however. For the future, who knows if fusion or renewable will work better for terrestrial grid applications once fusion reaches the point of a positive energy balance?