This is not a great way to look at it. Modern nuclear wouldn't use the kind of steam turbines that are currently used. It would either use the same turbines gas

This is not a great way to look at it. Modern nuclear wouldn't use the kind of steam turbines that are currently used. It would either use the same turbines gas plants. Some concepts use even more modern turbines but those are not commercially proven. However if there was serious commitment to nuclear, these things would be sensible to develop also. Your overall point is well taken, nuclear is better when running at full capacity, even if I would argue that with a modern reactor with less operational cost this would be less of an issue. That however is exactly why many nuclear plants in planning today will actually heat up molten salt and use that to drive the turbine. So there is basically a built in flexible heat battery. The idea of most modern approaches is actually to have more generation power then the reactor actually provides, and have a heat battery containing in between. This makes sense as you have to have a salt loop anyways, so adding a larger tank isn't really a big extra cost. Additionally it means that the nuclear build of your project is actually a smaller % of the cost with everything outside of the nuclear boundary being pretty standard salt loops and turbines. So you might build a 500MW nuclear plant with 1.5GW turbines plus a big tank full of salt. All the turbines and the salt tank have essentially nothing to do with nuclear or nuclear regulation. However if we had started to seriously consider this in the 60s/70s/80s, establishing wind and solar would never even have made any sense outside of some niches. You build nuclear plants that can load follow without issue and accept the capacity problem. Clever engineers and business people would have soon realized that the salt loop can double as a heat battery. The problem is simply that all these issues were not seriously considered in the past. Basically the Navy wanted PWR for submarines, because those got so much development the largest contractors and the government picked it up for civilian power. Once all the large nuclear companies had bought in to that, they no longer want lots of research on other types of reactors, so not even the nuclear industry advocated for such projects. Combine that with the general turning against nuclear and you basically get massive stagnation. Unfortunately all the Molten Salt based nuclear work was done in Tennessee, a place that was not very relevant politically. There is even a famous call where Nixon basically says, moves all that potential money to projects in California.