I think we're talking about different scales. Yes we haven't seen world wide nuclear but we have seen large cities worth of power. I think if we had that demonstrated with renewable storage it would look much better on paper.
If nuclear is not going to power the world, then renewables will have to. If nuclear supplies any substantial portion of the world's energy demand the issues I raised will bite. So to allow nuclear to evade those issues for ~1 generation of nuclear plants, renewables would have to supply almost all the world's energy demand. So that means storage will have to be solved (as nuclear would be horribly unsuited to covering outages in a renewable energy system.)
Given that renewables and storage will have to be made to work, and are likely to be cheaper, I don't see the point of nuclear in this scenario.
No, because there are thousands of potential battery chemistries (and storage technologies other than batteries), and also because the oft-repeated falsehood that PV contains rare earths is still false.
Lithium is best for mobility applications and lithium formulations are much further down the learning curve than other chemistries.
However, all of vanadium redox, iron-air, organic polymer-based, calcium salt, and sodium chemistries are very nearly competitive, or actually competitive with lithium in various grid storage niches despite being at the very beginning of their learning curves. Is there ever going to be a shortage of iron or sodium? Or calcium or carbon, for that matter? No.
Building new nuclear plants would be a silly response to the current energy shock in Europe, since it would take so long for new NPPs to come on line. Renewables to reduce gas demand make much more sense, available both more quickly and more cheaply.
Why not? Because it's economically pointless to build more nuclear at current prices.
The current situation where you might regret not having built more reactors 30 years ago is not comparable. Renewables were not competitive with nuclear 30 years ago. But that situation no longer obtains.
Renewables require backup generation. And usually that's gas burning powerplants because they have very short startup times. Main reason for wild prices of electricity in EU is gas supply crisis.
As response to the loss of Russian gas, renewables don't have to replace all fossil fuels. They just have to reduce fossil consumption enough to compensate for that loss.
Eventually, all fossil fuel use must be replaced, but that has nothing to do with the issue of responding to Putin that I was addressing. And the backup generation can eventually be non-fossil also, particularly hydrogen. Europe has massive amounts of potential capacity for underground storage for hydrogen, far more than would be needed.
