Companies investing in large scale commercial solar plants in the cloudy UK at the north of the planet, for profit, and without subsidies, proves that this is true.
Meanwhile Westinghouse Electric declared bankruptcy trying to finish the Vogtle nuclear power plant in discussion. 90% of nameplate capacity doesn't mean much at all if you can't afford to finish building the thing.
Tell you what: get back to me when someone actually builds one of your fantasy solar power plants at a competitive cost (which will involve multiplying the nameplate capacity by 9).
But we need to keep civilization running until then. Sorry.
Hey! I'm already back with proof positive results!
NextEra energy has installed over 45,500Mw of renewable energy and their earnings per share are 1.30. This all happened while the latest nuclear build put the builder into bankruptcy, yo!
The are - get this - the world's largest utility company.
Their future plans do include continuing running existing nuclear plants. But get this: it does not include building new nuclear. It does include building LOADS of new solar.
Lots more where NextEra came from.
> But we need to keep civilization running until then. Sorry.
We are. 1/5 of all the solar installed in the US was installed just last year. Your beloved nuclear is slowing fading into history while solar plants go up everywhere you look. Sorry! Even France knows the deal and will rely far less on nuclear in the coming years.
Didn't you say we were done here? Twice? What happened?
The original poster.
One of the followups has pointed out that in the REAL WORLD, a major solar plant is only expected to produce about 10% of its nameplate capacity.
While nuclear plants routinely produce 90% of their nameplate capacities.