Nuclear is not an option as the major energy consumption growth in the next 20-30 years will be in countries/regions where the current nuclear powers will not be willing to trust with nuclear power.
There are various studies on the topic. For Germany, the figures that stuck in my brain were these: We can go 60% renewable without much of a problem, 80% with strategic storage and significant grid improvements, 100% via off-shore windparks and power-to-gas (our natural gas infrastructure can store hundreds of TWh).
Energy storage cost is dropping rapidly and given enough storage, you have constant availability. Unlike what you claim, there's a lot of innovation on this front and solar/wind bids usually include it these days. These combined bids routinely underbid nuclear/coal/gas: it's already cheaper now; even when you don't consider subsidies.
So, you bring up an interesting point with cost per mwh. Nuclear is not nearly cheap enough to be competitive right now and would have to come down by magnitudes to out-compete solar/wind + storage in a few decades. I'd say a good price to shoot for with new nuclear designs that might still be too high would be around 0.1-0.5 cents per kwh in a few decades. That's only 10x less than current bids; you'd probably want to stay below that even. But anything over that would be dead on arrival in terms of profitability.
You dont take to account how much energy newer reactors produce. And to my knowledge its indeed "orders of magnitude" more than the old ones. This is simply because they burn whole fuel and not 1.64% of uranium old reactors do.
And I think we are way past the point where thinking about profitability should be our first concern.
ps. I find it hilarious when people talk about renewable energy sources but dont take into consideration energy storage. Batteries production may go down in price, but that doesnt change the fact how toxic that production is to environment and how big of a footprint it leaves for the future.
And help us get rid of the waste old nuclear reactors created. Taking to account thwt we cannot store energy efficiently enough beside few edge cases, the ability to generate enough base power makes nuclear plants superiour to anything we have.
Solar panels production has very bad impact on the environment in different areas than CO2 and those panels are worthless after 10years. Smelting parts for windturbines has the same issue of huge amount of turbines which require maintenance and take alot of space to place them correctly.
All of those technologies have serious drawbacks. While nuclear powerplant using new reactors has only one - its expensive to build but will last a century or more.
New reactors are expensive because of current regulations. Tolerances in various areas can be reduced for reactor designs that can gracefully shut down with a loss of power.
What you wrote there would be true if the levelized cost of energy from nuclear weren't so high. As it stands, the dirt cheapness of renewables (and particularly of renewables as they will be a decade in the future as they continue down their aggressive experience curves) will make dealing with intermittency cheaper than going with nuclear.
It could make sense to continue to operate existing nuclear power plants while taxing carbon emission, but the CO2 tax needed to justify new nuclear plants would be outrageously high. Long before that level of tax was reached renewables would snipe the market.
