While true, there's a question of why would you bother if you can build nuclear? 60-70% of my states' electricity use is 24/7 constant. Outside of that number,

While true, there's a question of why would you bother if you can build nuclear? 60-70% of my states' electricity use is 24/7 constant. Outside of that number, the downward slope between maxium and minimums is very long, and very slow and mostly at night. Nuclear plants are easily variable in fuel burn over these sorts of rates. The problem with solar and wind is that they can trip offline from the grid very quickly, so the entire question is whether you can plausibly backstop the grid for long enough without the need to spin up an extra powerplant. With a frontloaded capex asset like nuclear, once you are building it there's a big question as to how much value you get from not using it - i.e. the main benefit of solar and wind is if with storage they stop you needing to build a new nuclear plant. I would contend that the storage answer is very inadequate: it's not nearly good enough to have a grid which is only running with 1 day worth of banked power when you could have much longer periods of underproduction (which is the way most solar/wind storage solutions are presented). To safely have a distributed grid, you need months worth of stored power to average out the fluctuations. Storage just isn't cheap enough at that scale compared to nuclear reactors.