Nuclear power may be the key to least-cost, zero-emission electricity systems

If you ask 100 people, 99 will tell you that they rather live next to a solar panel or a silicon extraction mine than next to a nuclear power plant or a uranium mine.

Renewables fluctuate. Nuclear is not great at scaling, and most reactors cannot be shut down without taking weeks and months for safe re-starting.

Nuclear is good for base load. And countries that have a lot of (really expensive) nuclear to cover their base load, have zero incentive to invest into renewables, since its output would just become surplus.

For broad adoption of renewables, we need to accompany it with (hopefully clean) solutions that can buffer and restore surplus energy efficiently and most importantly scale up and down really fast, to smooth out the fluctuations. Keeping a constant 50 Hz is becoming increasingly difficult with renewables.

In the past Austria used to store (nightly) surpulus energy from german nuclear reactors and (more recent also renewables) and getting paid to do so, to feed it into the own network and also selling abroad during daytime. This was stopped because it was putting a lot of strain on the north-south bottlenecks in the German power network, aggravated by large wind farms in the north, that became capable of covering the whole German power use for short periods of time.

"Previous studies have shown that curbing 80 percent of carbon emissions can be achieved by ramping up wind and solar power harvesting installations"

and

"To nail down that last 10 or 20 percent of decarbonization, we need to have more tools in our toolbox, and not just wind and solar,"

The "more tools" may be nuclear or it may be storage, depending on the cost of both technologies in the future:

"Added Caldeira: “Our analysis looked at the cheapest way to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions assuming today’s prices..at today’s price, nuclear is the cheapest way to eliminate all electricity-system carbon emissions nearly everywhere...if energy storage technologies became very cheap, then wind and solar could potentially be the least-cost path to a zero-emission electricity system.”"

IMO, it seems too early to bet on either, so carry on developing both until more data is available.

The article says least-cost, we're fresh out of perfect solutions.