I don't get how this relates to my original point. Do you agree or disagree that both wind and nuclear need fossil fuel backups if there is no hydro that can fill in for the missing capacity?

No, because I think nukes can be throttled and designed for load following, particularly on the timeframes required for grid supply.

Are you suggesting to run the current ones at lower than optimal output and only run at optimal output when necessary? That doesn't sound like a good use of capital.

Vs having 100% of your worse case capacity in gas plants sitting around idle?

The solar/wind numbers aren't even remotely comparable at this point because no one factors those in until the power bill shows up, then somehow the price goes up as we add more "cheap" renewables.

Then each kWh costs even more. But they already cost too much.

Ok sure, ignore the CO2 costs... Because without nukes your going to get carbon production, and with energy usage growing year over year, CO2 usage will continue to increase. If your lucky it might go down for a couple years before resuming the upward trend, but that doesn't even look probable at this point since countries are killing their carbon free sources (nukes) faster than they are growing the percentage of CO2 free energy production.

And those nukes are going to look downright inexpensive if/when we ever get the point of consuming more than say 2/3'rds of the yearly power from wind/solar.

So, keep wishing for that magic renewable bullet and keep watching the gobal CO2 increase and getting pushback from people who aren't happy about rolling blackouts, or their energy prices going up and up and up.

If the greenheads got out of the way and stopped trying to kill every nuke plant the engineering and construction prices would fall significantly. Its not like they are actually that hard to build, we did it in the past, and places that aren't Europe and the US somehow manage to do it for significantly less too. AKA, the price is a political problem not a technical one.

Each nuke project greenlighted means burning coal for ten or more years while building it. The money spent just on that coal over those ten years would have paid for enough solar to displace it all, immediately, and then more after.

The money handed over to the contractor for the nuke, meanwhile, could have instead built out several more matching solar and wind farms, that would also come online in just a year or two, displacing that many times more CO2 emission.

So, each nuke plant started, diverting money from building out renewables, brings climate catastrophe nearer. Coal interests are lobbying now for nuke projects, because it means a continuing market for coal while they are built, vs. wind and solar that displace coal market share immediately.

? This sounds like fiction, have any actual numbers?

Even nuke prices outside of the US and Europe are barely more expensive these days than the cost of wind and a gas plant, making them actually less expensive when the gas plant fuel costs are factored in over its lifespan.

Spend some time with: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=nuclear+construction+prices...

For starters lets look at: https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u...

which has such wonderful nuggets as: "A breakthrough came in 1963 with GE's contract to build a low-cost light-water reactor at Oyster Creek, New Jersey. By the late 1960s, overnight construction costs for new reactors had dropped to $600 to $900/kW in today's dollars — cheaper than modern gas plants. Atomic energy was on a roll."

The cost is basically bullcrap, even now, if you look at the prices for American and French companies to build plants in China sure its more than a wind farm, but actually about the same per KW when you factor in the gas plant needed to backup that wind farm, nevermind solar...

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

And those are basically one off, if you think the Chinese are going to be paying those premiums for their own home grown designs I think your probably missing the past 25 years or so of Chinese economic theory, which is summarized as learn how to build it utilizing foreign companies, frequently at great cost, build a few experimental copies/etc and then start stamping out home grown designs for a fraction of the cost. That is after all why your solar panels are so inexpensive. At least where I'm at though, the price of solar hasn't really declined much over the past 15 years or so, because the labor costs now account for probably 2/3th+ of the installed system costs. Going from a $1.50 a W panels to $.60 panels while the install cost climbs at a faster rate hasn't been a winning combination.

Let us know when you have installed a nuke in your house. Comparing cost of rooftop solar here to utility-scale nukes in countries with lax safety regulations and enforcement says more about you than about utility costs.

We already have gas plants, and would anyway need them regardless, so including them in the cost of the renewables is special pleading.

These tricks do not fool anybody. Shame on you.