They want their trains to run or electricity in their hospitals, even though they's no sun/wind for a several days. Unless your renewable installation can provide that, it's not comparable to a nuclear plant and solar/wind doesn't win. The best example of this is Germany who is one of the worst CO2 emitter in Europe despite their huge investment in renewable.
Right now solar and storage are eating into the most economically-profitable generation. That means we’re seeing deployments of storage that shift supply a few hours into the high-demand evening period. This will work well in places that get a lot of sunlight or that have lots of sunny days or highly-connected grids (Europe is in the process of building HVDC links to North Africa for this reason.) What’s going to happen is that this low-hanging profitable fruit will be plucked first, and then as storage costs decrease (happening quickly as we speak) we’ll see a second layer of multi-day and seasonal storage get deployed. The problem for nuclear is that (1) this construction will eat a lot of the most profitable generation opportunities, and (2) nuclear takes so long to build (and has such a long payback period) that any new plant will arrive just as storage gets cheap enough to make it unprofitable.
Nuclear electricity is rather expensive.
Are you sure the demand forecast someone calculated cannot be meet by ramping up hydro? Or importing electricity?
In Germany, the right parties did block any project that had the smell of environment protection. And the pseudo-green clowns are no game changer.
