China is installing two orders of magnitude more renewables than nuclear.

Judging by what China is doing, renewables have soundly defeated nuclear. It's not clear why they're building any new nuclear plants now. Probably organizational inertia?

I think preserving nuclear industry is a decent justification on its own.

Especially the whole steam turbine/generator tech is a huge synergy for them (because all their coal plants need basically the same), and gutting suppliers by scaling back nuclear ambitions could have highly detrimental side-effects there.

Coal power is still the back-bone of their grid, and provides basically all the dispatchability (for now).

I think the big incoming challenge for renewables will be surpassing the 70%-ish percent mark (of produced electricity), because at that point intermittency is gonna become much more challenging (it's an easy problem as long as you can just down-regulate existing plants-- buffering with batteries is significantly more expensive, and they don't have a lot of gas either, which works pretty well for this).

I'm pretty confident that battery progress is gonna keep pace, and other countries are already way further in the switch to renewables anyway; China will be able to get free lessions there (e.g. Germany).

I want to note that the intermittency problems for a 100% renewable grid are not significantly different from a 90% renewable + 10% nuclear grid. Nuclear does very little to help because to make economic sense it has to be kept running most of the time, and so not much capacity can be kept in reserve to deal with renewables dropping out.

I'll also note that if renewables have reached 70%, the residual demand will be so uneven that new nuclear won't make any sense, as it won't be possible to keep it running most of the time. Too often renewables will be delivering 100% of demand and nuclear will have no market.

As renewables grow, prices become spikier. So what's wanted is some source with low capex that can jump in an exploit these spikes. Gas peakers are an example, but eventually the gas can be something other than natural gas (if NG is taxed for its CO2). Green hydrogen may be the best bet for the 100% renewable end game.