Nuclear, wind, solar, they all need storage. Wind and solar because sometimes there is no wind or sun. Nuclear because building out for peak capacity is unaffordable.
But I responded to 'Nuclear uptime is orders of magnitude better than solar or wind'. That is simply not true. Uptime cannot be 10 times better. It could be rephrased as the downtime of nuclear is one order of magnitude smaller than wind. But even that is not clear. And certainly not 'orders of magnitude'.
The "backup" for nuclear is another nuclear plant. It is unlikely that both will go down at once.
This won't work with solar or wind becuase no sun in one location usually means no sun in a much larger area around it. Same for wind.
The sun and wind much further away are of no use because it is not practical to tranmit that electricity to the location it needs to be.
The existing nuclear plants have ceased production once every few years at the worst. In contrast, wind mills and solar panels stop producing electricity multiple times everyday.
Nuclear cannot do peak power in any affordable way. So it doesn't matter how reliable nuclear is, if there is not enough power in late afternoon/early evening then the grid is broken.
Given the current costs for nuclear power, you can do a lot of crazy stuff with wind and solar (like transporting it over long distances) and still be cheaper than nuclear.
This is absolute nonsense. Of course nuclear can power up and down. Who told you it couldn't? The fuel costs of nuclear are a tiny tiny portion of the operating costs, so it's trivially easy to power on/off the reactor.
Also, the long distance transport costs for electricity are massive - can be 30% loss. Look at HydroQuebec. They massively overproduce just to transport over HUGE long distance power towers because of the huge losses - and that's only 500 miles.
But I responded to 'Nuclear uptime is orders of magnitude better than solar or wind'. That is simply not true. Uptime cannot be 10 times better. It could be rephrased as the downtime of nuclear is one order of magnitude smaller than wind. But even that is not clear. And certainly not 'orders of magnitude'.