The forced outage rate of nuclear is between 1% and 20% depending on how the program is run (abandoning plants that are having problems vs. Maintaining the whol

The forced outage rate of nuclear is between 1% and 20% depending on how the program is run (abandoning plants that are having problems vs. Maintaining the whole fleet) and last weeks. The scheduled outage rate is 15%. Your backup has to be able to cover several months. Spending an equal amount on VRE, transmission and storage gives you a much lower shortfall per dollar for a given power target than spending the same money on nuclear. Shortfalls over 1 week are incredibly rare. The curtailed energy also decarbonizes many other things like iron reduction and ammonia production.