>> The levelized cost of wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear. They can be brought online in months rather than years, they can be deployed at whateve

>> The levelized cost of wind and solar is already cheaper than nuclear. They can be brought online in months rather than years, they can be deployed at whatever scale is needed and we can use market forces to do so. I'm not personally aware of any place where this is actually true. Even assuming you are not building out wind and solar on the scale of a country like germany you still need comparable subsidies to incentivize power producers to build new renewable energy sources; to say nothing of the grid management cost. You can quibble with exactly how large the subsidy is and, to be fair; unless you are employed by a consulting comapany you will never have access to the internal accounting figures that actually value the marginal cost of electricity produced by variable renewable sources compared to conventional sources but the subsidy is almost certainly not less than 15-17% of the wholesale price. Given that this subsidy is guaranteed by law to extend far into the future it simply defies imagination to assume that the levelized cost is somehow comparable at all. I see this kind of argument a lot and a fair number of times someone claims they work in the energy industry or at a think tank with renewable energy or something. If that is the case I find it strange that they can't name actual examples where wind/solar don't require subsidies. It's usually just a link to a Lezard report with strange CoC assumptions.