Batteries and panels degrade over time. So if you are trying to maintain a specific amount of power you would need to keep investing in order to maintain the same amount of power generation

absurd. Uranium mines need huge exclusion zones. In fact the biggest ones have large enough exclusion zones that more solar energy could be harvested than the energy content of the uranium underneath.

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.

Vogtle’s numbers are incredibly biased considering they made an entire design and then had to redo it halfway through that’s not a realistic cost that can be expected for future projects. We also have vogtles design be approved now so that new plants can be built for a fraction of the cost. Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?

They had to switch halfway through which is what added the cost that’s not a realistic cost per reactor

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.

97% sounds impressive, but thats equivalent to almost an hour of blackout every day. Developed societies demand +99.99% availability from their grids.

I you live where sun is abundant all year round… In which case (Las Vegas?) I would question the choice of having humans living in a fucking desert in the first place. But man I wish I could cover my needs between October and March here in Europe but no battery will help me store so much for so long

Yeah, they do, and they pretend to be wise adults while doing it. Like they're the only ones who thought of this.

EVs, too. No, we don't have to wait until they can all do 1000 miles and charge in 5 minutes. 350 miles and 20 minute 10-80% charge is fine for the vast majority of the market.

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

Funny enough lots of people hate that. Lots of people have binary thinking, it's either 100% coal or 100% solar.

Yeah but that would not account for the electricity need: in winter we need between 1000/1300 kWh mainly for heating / domestic hot water. Other months under 250 even if we use air conditioning. So if you cover the 7 nice months you still get absolutely wrecked by the dreaded 4 in the winter cost wise…

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.

See and this is why we need to subsidize poor old coal. It can't compete without it. Won't someone think of the miners! /s

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

But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear

I think Lazard's LCOE methodology looks at the entire life cycle of the power plant, specific to that power plant. So they amortize solar startup/decommissioning costs across the 20 year life cycle of solar, but when calculating LCOE for nuclear, they spread the costs across the 80 year life cycle of a nuclear plant.

Nuclear is just really, really expensive. Even if plants required no operating costs, the up front costs are so high that it represents a significant portion of the overall operating costs for any given year.

The Vogtle debacle in Georgia cost $35 billion to add 2 MW 2GW (edit to fix error) of capacity. They're now projecting that over the entire 75 year lifespan the cost of the electricity will come out to be about $0.17 to $0.18 per kilowatt hour.

Coal has long been unprofitable, and nuclear has always needed huge state funding (you get weapons as the byproduct of nuclear power, hence the subsidies). Until it beats gas it still isn't cheap enough imo. Gas of course is still massively subsidised too though, and that's where we need to continue to work: our policy makers need to end fossil fuel subsidies

As others have said this is for Las Vegas which receives wayyy more sun than the average place. But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear