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This misses the point. You cannot compare solar and nuclear directly, because they serve different needs.

Without battery or natural gas, solar and wind are not useful. You have to have some sort of backup, sufficient to avoid brownouts or blackouts, and so you end up with the full capitalization and maintenance cost of not-solar anyway.

To properly compare solar with nuclear, you must add on the cost of battery and / or natural gas (or equivalent fast backup), at which point nuclear is cheaper.



Here's solar+battery for $40/MWh. https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...

That's at least half the cost of nuclear, maybe as much as a fifth.




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