Nameplate capacity is the generated capacity without accounting for intermittency in power generation. The reality is, plants do not generate their full capacity for the entirety of their operation.

> The second is time to market. Renewables can be brought online much faster than a nuclear plant. This (along with staged introduction) allows renewables to track actual demand rather than needing to be able to predict future demand. Failure to do that was the cause of much utility pain in the first nuclear era, including the bankruptcy of the WPPSS ("Whoops"). Demand for electricity suddenly stopped growing. The same dynamic occurred more recently as the "nuclear renaissance" collided with suddenly cheap natural gas.

You're hand-waving away the fact that intermittent sources are exactly that: intermittent. And what happens when the demand for energy occurs when the renewable supply of energy is not available? Germany and California both encountered the same problem, and they both used the same solution: use fossil fuels. That is why Germany's carbon emissions have remained flat for the last decade [1] despite renewable power generation doubling in the same period of time[2]. It doesn't matter how much energy wind and solar produces if you need to revert to hydrocarbons in the evening.

The levels of energy storage necessary to run an electrical entirely on renewable energy remain the stuff of science fiction. Batteries are possible, but using those would cause the price of electric vehicles to increase considerably and ensure that hydrocarbons remain the primary fuel for cars. California uses hydroelectric storage, but the efficiency is extremely low (over 70% energy lost).

By comparison, nuclear plants provide continuous output throughout the day. You paint this as a negative, when it's really not. If excess power is generated, then use that excess power to sequester carbon. Too much energy is an easy problem to solve, too little energy is not.

> The final metric by which renewables are destroying nuclear is rate of improvement. Renewables have shown strong and consistent experience effects. Solar improves in cost by ~20% for each doubling of cumulative installed capacity. Nuclear, on the other hand, has not consistently shown any experience effects. This is likely related to the fundamental complexity of large, integrated nuclear systems, vs. the improvement trends seen in design and manufacture of small, highly replicated systems (a phenomenon well known in Silicon Valley).

This is exactly that I explained in my comment above. Most nuclear power in the United States has been one-off projects to the public's unwillingness to see widespread adoption. By comparison, countries that used serialized plant designs (most famously, France) saw much cheaper nuclear power construction. Yes, replicated designs are much cheaper to build than unique designs. That is why nuclear power was so cost-effective in France while so much more expensive in the United States.

The reality is that there are only two proven methods of powering nations with carbon-free energy: Geographically dependent solutions like hydroelectric power and geothermal power. And nuclear power.

1. https://www.economist.com/europe/2017/11/09/germany-is-missi...

2. https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/128...