It's much cheaper, faster, and less risky (financially) to replace them with renewables. It's a bit of an academic exercise anyway at this point because it just

It's much cheaper, faster, and less risky (financially) to replace them with renewables. It's a bit of an academic exercise anyway at this point because it just takes a decade plus to plan any new nuclear. That's based on a sample of next to nothing because there just isn't a whole lot of nuclear coming online at all. Nor is there a whole lot of capacity stuck in the planning or construction pipeline. And what little does come online does so late, over budget, etc. So those handful of pitiful plants are not a great reference from the point of view of convincing people to do some more. Renewables on the other hand are coming online by the tens of gw every year. There are still learning effects, and prices are still coming down further. As for baseload (which I assume is what you are referring to here), that seems to be an elusive concept that is just never expressed in twh. Because as soon as you do that, you can start imagining all sorts of alternative and much cheaper, practical, less hand wavy, and faster ways of getting that capacity in place than building actual nuclear plants at scale. I mean, how many nuclear plants do we actually need? 2, 5, 200? At least put a number on it. Do we need any plants at all? Nobody seems to know this or want to talk about this in any level of detail that you could use to actually start planning some budgets for this. It's just presumed lazily that we need unspecified (typically to the extent of committing nontrivial percentages of the world's GDP to this) amounts of it to ensure our anxiety levels stay within acceptable range. It's completely irrational at this point. Meanwhile, the amount of wind and solar coming online keeps beating expectations and battery production is ramping up from gwh scale to twh scale per year. It's the only practical alternative that exists to nuclear right now. And it's being done at a ridiculous scale because it's an order of magnitude or two cheaper (and dropping further). To make a dent into that, you need a lot of nuclear plants at this point for it to even matter and at a much lower cost than most nuclear proponents seem willing to entertain. I don't see that happening really. Doubling or quadrupling the amount of renewables + battery seems much easier, doable, and cheaper at this point. Especially if it needs to be done in a timely fashion.