2. yes we are sure, because even current green tech — PV and "enough" batteries — is already cost-competitive with nuclear, and we have good reasons to expect both PV and storage to get cheaper.
I love PV tech, I think it’s incredibly useful for small and medium scale self sustainability. And yes, in many areas it makes sense to dedicate a bunch of space to PVs and energy storage.
But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you massively overbuild capacity you’ll always face a weather threat.
Until we manage to harness nuclear fusion we’ll need nuclear fission along with hydropower to be the backbone of our energy generation.
This is why I still support nuclear despite the cost.
Although…
> But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you massively overbuild capacity you’ll always face a weather threat.
isn't strictly true. In a magical alternative reality where we can do mega-projects and can ignore geopolitics, antipodal power grids are technically fine, much cheaper than batteries, and don't need any backups.
(I'm not sure how easy/hard it would be to make one without such assumptions, only that it takes a minimum of about one years' global aluminium production, so treat it as merely an interesting though experiment at this point).
But 1. a large part of that is regulatory expenses not inherent to the technology, and 2. are we sure it is uneconomically expensive after taking into account the expenses spared by not completely fucking up our climate stability?