Most of the time you can get away with a relatively small amount of storage but sometimes you get an extended "dry spell", so you might need two weeks or more storage to be entirely reliable.
Renewables have been workable so far because of low-cost gas turbines fired by methane that take up the slack: we know now that methane is 80 or so times more potent a global warming gas than carbon dioxide, so if you lose 1% of the gas in handling it is a big problem.
The fact is that nuclear waste is not waste. The light water reactor extracts about 1% of the energy that a fast reactor could extract from uranium. In fact, molten salt fast reactors can not only consume plutonium and other actinides but also destroy a good fraction of the most dangerous fission products.
There is a lot more to nuclear waste than just the fuel rods. Lots of materials that are either used by workers at the plant or part of the plant become radio active and can no longer go to a regular landfill of other trash processing facilities. That is why some energy companies are trying to default rather than pay for decommissioning plants once they have reached the maximum age that they were constructed for.
An average nuclear power plant puts out 1GW of energy in under 2.5 square kilometers, or 1 square mile. To achieve the same output (Since you'd need double the panels + storage to produce energy at night) you'd need to destroy 450 square kilometers of natural habitat to generate the same energy with solar panels. Realistically you'd need much more than that to account for cloudy days, and even more to offset electrical transmission losses because no one is building a solar farm in latitudes that see 100+ cloudy days per year.
Detractors of nuclear will argue "Why don't we do rooftop solar".. well, 56% of the world's population lives in cities where that's not possible, and that number isn't decreasing. NYC for example uses on the order of ~50GW or 51 Terawatts per year. You'd have to cover 15% of the state in silicon glass to get anywhere close to powering it. Personally, I'd rather take a chance on nuclear in lieu of the the massive amount of environmental destruction required to power modern society with solar energy.
93% capacity factor nuclear [0]
1 GW
8700000000 kWh/year [1]
440 Wp @ 1960x1308x40 mm [2]
1.96 m
1.308 m
2.56368 m2
440 Wp
0.85 kWh factor for the Netherlands [3]
374 kWh per year
145.8840417 kWh/m2
59636406.42 m2 for to match nuclear
59.63640642 km2
[0] https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliab...
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+GW+to+kwh+per+year
[2] https://www.enfsolar.com/pv/panel-datasheet/crystalline/1049...
[3] https://www.tentensolar.nl/semi-overheid/dossiers/item/zonne...
449 nuclear reactors in the world [0]
2 disasters leading to large exclusion zones
average area of those exclusion zones 1300 square miles [1]
average exclusion zone per reactor (very roughly) 5.8 square miles
15.0 square kilometres
So solar panels use up about 4 times as much space as "average" nuclear reactors (not including the relatively small area used by the plant itself[2]), but of course the value of land with solar panels on is much higher than radioactively contaminated land.
[0] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-that-have-t...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29152930
[2] https://www.nei.org/news/2015/land-needs-for-wind-solar-dwar...
There’s also widespread reporting that the evacuations and exclusion zones, in Fukushima at least, were excessive.
Renewables + batteries, why not. This technology is not at a stage yet where we can use it. There are literally no “guaranteed power on demand” facilities from renewables+batteries.
Nuclear technology is mostly old and boring by now.
We currently have an inefficient long-term storage plan for it - store it on-site.
We had an efficient, cheaper long-term storage plan (Yucca mountain) that failed for political, not technical reasons.
The LWR extracts about only 1% of the energy from uranium. Next generation reactors like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ApH-0YHkA
can burn much more of the fuel and even destroy much of the dangerous fission products.
Looking at it that way we've already mined enough fuel to run our civilization for a few hundred years. It's good news.
As with most of America's problems, this is an entirely political problem, not a technical one.
Doesn't it seem like solar + batteries is a much better solution? We could cover large parts of the US with solar panels, store it during the day, and charge large fleets of electric cars overnight. Then, the issue is one of non-radioactive toxic waste storage instead of radioactive toxic waste storage, which seems a bit more tractable.