My understanding of the nuclear opposition from the renewable groups is that nuclear effectively has a massive upfront capex cost and delayed capex for decommissioning 3-5 decades later along with extremely low marginal costs to operate.
This means that in order to make "cheap" nuclear, you need to operate the plant at max capacity as long as you can. While this makes great "base load" it can't complement renewables like natural gas can, natural gas peaker plants can simply burn when renewables aren't available "low capex, high opex".
I'm curious how the UK is approaching the economics here, it's quite possible to reduce the capex of nuclear - and it's also possible to simply plan for something along the lines of a 40/60 split between nuclear and renewables where renewables take "peak demand" and high energy use industries.
This means that in order to make "cheap" nuclear, you need to operate the plant at max capacity as long as you can. While this makes great "base load" it can't complement renewables like natural gas can, natural gas peaker plants can simply burn when renewables aren't available "low capex, high opex".
I'm curious how the UK is approaching the economics here, it's quite possible to reduce the capex of nuclear - and it's also possible to simply plan for something along the lines of a 40/60 split between nuclear and renewables where renewables take "peak demand" and high energy use industries.