> Sorry, my perspective is precisely the opposite. Nameplate capacity is a farce --I have said this much-- because it is only valid under ideal laboratory test conditions. Solar zealots are the ones who use nameplate ratings, or worse, solar radiation per square meter, to justify solar fantasies. Building and actually looking at the data from my system (something most solar panel owners don't do) delivered an education I probably could not have gotten any other way. If anything, it made me think and eventually decide I needed to to understand it the way I do any other engineering project I approach.

This sounds like pretty big fixation to me. I'm sorry you had unrealistic expectations for your solar install, but that doesn't change the inviability of nuclear. Also did you think to get a system with bypass diodes or are you also suffering from reduced efficiency of the whole system during partial shade?

> These are not problems.

Then why are they suddenly problems when renewables are involved?

> You'd have to model this in order to understand it. Beyond a certain threshold or concentration of EV's in an area, you eventually get to a situation where you have a massive number of vehicles plugged into the grid 24/7. That's the simplest way I can put it.

Charging things in a stupid way far more than they need it is stupid. News at 11.

Simply charge whichever EVs are stationary and not full, wherever they happen to be, whenever there is surplus power (4 extension cords, 4 transformers and 4 metal boxes per person is hardly a big investment compared to $40-200k of nuclear reactors to meet peak demand so they can all charge at once at 5pm). This is one of the few problems that is actually very simple to solve with markets (put a price on charging outside of the hours with approximately free solar power).

Mean driving distance is about 30 miles. With a reasonably efficient EV this is about 7kWh/d or 350GW if it happens only when solar electrickty is cheap.

Why would you spend $12 trillion on this problem when $1 trillion of solar, wind and storage would solve it (and this will halve or better before your first nuclear plant comes online)?

Additionally you can solve it from the other end. Forcing people to drive monster trucks 30 miles a day is an intentional policy decision. If you stop forcing the issue it will correct itself. If you put some of those $12 trillion into decent infrastructure, driving will halve or better. Even throwing LEVs into the mix for any family's second+ vehicle reduces that 7kWh/day to around 2.

Here's another simple model to play with (only uniform demand unfortunately). https://energy.model

Main caveat for somewhere like the US is it will aggregate weather over the entire country without considering problems like interfacing with texas. Maybe consider a smaller country with similar weather to get a more realistic estimate. Compare US nuclear capital costs ($10-12 per nameplate watt) to the 80c/nameplate watt non tilting or $1.3/nameplate watt tilting of recent US projects, or about half that for projects still in the permiting phase.