Renewables aren't any better at load following than current nuclear technology, and unlike nuclear energy there's no potential for the development of proposed d

Renewables aren't any better at load following than current nuclear technology, and unlike nuclear energy there's no potential for the development of proposed designs that do have load-following capability. Never mind the fact that intermittent renewables themselves are the reason the 'mostly base load with some load following' model is obsolete, precisely because they can't be relied upon to generate electricity on demand. Denmark is definitely the poster child of wind energy (and intermittent renewables in general), but it benefits enormously from utilizing the existing pumped hydro storage of Sweden and Norway, which is an option the vast majority of countries don't have. The economics would look at lot worse if they were having the build out batteries to provide that storage capacity instead of taking advantage of what's already there. Just saying 'you need to have a firm grip on leaks' is trivializing a significant engineering problem. Existing natural gas plants have a 1-9% leak rate, and given than leaking fuel is a complete waste of money we can safely assume that doing better than that is non-trivial. Given that in the case of carbon-neutral 'synthetic' methane you have the possibility of leaks at the manufacturing plant as well as in transmission/storage, it's reasonable to expect a figure closer to the higher end of that spectrum, which makes lifetime emissions from Wind/Solar sources significantly worse than Nuclear on a per-GWh basis.