I mean there are ongoing costs with any form of power generation. Obviously there's fuel costs for most, but even other renewables have maintenance costs.
You'll also need to keep investing anyway as power demands increase over time. So newer solar installations eventually replace the old.

What's the exclusion zone of rare earth mines ? Of the terrible chemicals required to extract those products ? Same question with the batteries. What's the impact of the shade on agriculture ? How about all the steel, concrete and composites on the environment, how do they degrade ? Is it in micro plastics ?

I didn't say nuclear energy was good, just that solar panels are worse. The perfect energy source doesn't exist but currently all the data I've come across points to the direction that nuclear is significantly better than all other renewables and don't require significant battery storage.

Also if anti-science ecologists hadn't blocked so many fast neutron reactors, we'd be further along to a tech that can burn existing thorium stockpiles for 8000 years without further mining and while producing significantly less dangerous waste than current reactors. I guess we'll just buy the design from China and Russia who didn't stop the research and have currently operating reactors right now.

Yes, what I am saying is that cost is being shown for nuclear and not shown for solar due to using an intentionally small window of time. It’s like comparing an ICE to an EV and talking about the refueling costs of gas and treating electricity like it’s free.

solar panels don't use rare earths. They use sand. Rare earths and lithium are not radioactive. Thorium is more expensive than Uranium processing and molten salt reactors have never lasted long.

Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?

I'm just familiar with Lazard's LCOE methodology. The linked paper talks about LCOE, so that's just how that particular cost analysis works.

Ok, current projections are still for the next two AP1000s at Vogtle to be something like $10 billion. That's just not cost competitive with solar/wind. And it's also not very realistic to assume that there won't be cost overruns on the next one, either. Complex engineering projects tend to run over.

Next two? After you mentioned it I tried googling and can’t find anything about current projections for new AP1000s at vogtle.

The diagram shows that they fall short on winter mornings

My own modelling to decide what size battery I want for my house says it's easy almost every day, but when you have three rainy and overcast days in a row you need a battery far larger or an alternative. For me the alternative is the grid; at grid scale it's gas generators

theres also nothing much going on LV too, limited schools and and private physicians.

Urgh, the ones that say "well my ice car can do 700 miles on a tank so until EV can do that I'm not doing it" annoy the hell out of me.

I know damn well they're never driven that far without stopping at least once

If somebody has to keep that gas generator serviced only to run it on winter mornings, that electricity is going to be very pricey.

No, but I don't think you're appreciating how difficult it would be to fill that 3%. It's not just about having 3% more power from something. It's having it at the right time. It needs to be on demand. Having something on demand that has to cover all it's costs selling just 3% isn't easy.

It's more resilient to have mixed supply where multiple types of generation take a proportion. Then when one falls short another can scale up a little.

They just assumed a constant draw I think.

Indeed, but cheaper than enough batteries to cover those times

In the off grid home scale one I'd size and set the generator to run for several hours in a row to fully charge the battery on days when the battery was at a sufficiently low charge entering the night, at least that's what my current modelling suggests. Diesel gensets work best when running fully loaded for at least long enough to warm up

I guess at grid scale you find the sweet spot where most years the gas power station and batteries are balanced to provide cheapest power averaged over the year