Yes. Short term renewables supplement existing grid and reduce the average pollution. It is good to reduce the problem and should be used so that on good condit

Yes. Short term renewables supplement existing grid and reduce the average pollution. It is good to reduce the problem and should be used so that on good conditions it will practically take over all production. However it can not replace the polluting producers on its own, who seem to have started to switch operation to mostly when there is not enough renewables to supply the demand (marginal costs like fuel + investment vs the so-called merit order). Nuclear could operate just like the dirty producers and only operate when the combined wind and solar is too low for the demand, which would further reduce the environmental impact, but the massive investment needed in nuclear makes the economics of it a bit complex and I have not read if the marginal costs of nuclear operations make this a viable tactic. It would however reduce the nuclear pollution down to the gaps where wind and solar is not enough. That leaves future tech solutions. Smart grids sounds great, through I do not know how big part of it is a political issue or technical problem. Just getting the steel industry to focus operation on energy producing peaks seems to be a major challenge, and they already have the incentive that the energy get cheaper if they do so. Converting hydro to create burst of power rather than continuously is also something very interesting but has also both political and technical issues to solve. Then we have different from of battery ideas, all from pumping water to different heat capturing concepts, through I think that is even further away form being implemented on a large scale. The article talks about the proposed subsidy, and this is where I think we need to think about the grid as a whole. If the goal is to fill the gap when wind and solar can't supply the demand then the discussion should not be renewable vs nuclear. It is very possible that the specific subsidy is a bad tactic and they would be better served by trying to narrow the gap with even more wind and solar, but then we need data to show that existing dirty producers are preferred over nuclear in order to fill the remaining gap. That to me is a hard sell, but I am open to be convinced :).