The point is that nuclear is indeed capable of being built rapidly. Over the span of 15 years France went from 10% nuclear power to 80%. You claim that nuclear can't be built at speed, and that this isn't borne out by reality. This is not only untrue, it is the opposite of true: it was borne out by reality.
You're making a sharp pivot here, away from construction time to cost. Yes, nuclear is much cheaper when the same design is built repeatedly instead of first-of-a-kind reactors. This is already well known.
Solar and wind are cheaper in terms of raw generation costs, but don't actually offer a path to decarbonization because of their intermittency. Solar and wind are cheap when they supplement fossil fuels. But they need to be paired with storage to be used as a primary source of power, and we don't have a feasible plan to provide that much storage let alone how much it'd cost.
Not sure if you're writing that off as unfeasible, but clearly there are solutions being thought about, and there are companies in the market today selling storage with costs going down every single year. It's not unreasonable to think that the 'feasible' plan for storage is to, well, simply buy/install it; which becomes cheaper every single year.
> Not sure if you're writing that off as unfeasible, but clearly there are solutions being thought about, and there are companies in the market today selling storage with costs going down every single year. It's not unreasonable to think that the 'feasible' plan for storage is to, well, simply buy/install it; which becomes cheaper every single year.
Yes, it is. There's enough known lithium deposits to produce 5 minutes worth of storage. With current mining techniques, there's an estimated 20 minutes worth of storage. [1]
> Also, solar thermal plants (no storage required) are a thing:
You're making a sharp pivot here, away from construction time to cost. Yes, nuclear is much cheaper when the same design is built repeatedly instead of first-of-a-kind reactors. This is already well known.
Solar and wind are cheaper in terms of raw generation costs, but don't actually offer a path to decarbonization because of their intermittency. Solar and wind are cheap when they supplement fossil fuels. But they need to be paired with storage to be used as a primary source of power, and we don't have a feasible plan to provide that much storage let alone how much it'd cost.