There is no single solution to grid sources. The argument that PV can't sustain the whole grid on their own is as much of a straw man as the argument that nukes can't ramp quickly enough to track load. Both are true, but so what? All resources on the grid back up the other resources.
Getting the mix right for grid reliability at the lowest cost to ratepayers is a constantly moving target. But that target is moving away from, not toward large centralized power plants.
The nuclear biz has been heavily subsidized since day-1, and that's part of the problem. The reactor types of the existing nuclear fleet in the US were driven by the US Navy's and the technology needs, and the needs of the weapons industry. Even third generation pressurized water reactors are too large, lumpy and expensive to make economic sense in a competitive grid environment. The fast breeder reactors that have pretty much gone by the wayside didn't make sense unless you were planning to build a lot of particular types of weapons. These reactors designs were adapted for electric power, but far from ideal for that task. There are better (and cheaper) ways.
The inherently melt-down proof designs such as molten salt or pebble bed reactors that operate at atmospheric pressure would make a lot more sense since the don't require large containment structures or redundant backup cooling & power systems, and they scale down in sized reasonably, and may eventually be commercialized if it turns out they actually make economic sense (with or without subsidy.)
But the economics of power production can change in the amount of time it takes to design & build a pressurized water reactor, even without excessive governmental red tape. The whole centralized power plant business takes a lot more grid infrastructure to support than distributed generation (such as PV or cogens), and at the pace things are currently changing in the power biz the large centralized powerplant model is going to go away. The lack of new nuclear of the large scale PWR type very much IS an economic issue, since it require a very large bet into a very uncertain market future, which is why no investment banks will touch it without Federal guarantees. The WPPS bond failure had nothing to do with "...irrational anti-nuke crowd...", and
everything to do with the size of the bet in a very fickle electricity market future, and the difficulty of managing construction projects of that scale & complexity. It's still a fickle market, but even more so now than 35 years ago, now that the age of cheap scalable renewables have arrived, and can be economically installed on both sides of the meter. The central powerplant model is destined to go away.
That's not just my semi-literate opinion, that's the
recently articulated opinion of the CEO of National Grid, the largest utility in the UK (which also owns & operates a big chunk of the New England grid.) That's also the opinion of the leadership at NRG, the largest merchant power generation company in the US, which has a lot of nukes & coal plants in their current portfolio.
NRG is currently in the middle of divorcing the renewables end of their business from the traditional powerplant end, in part because they are competing with themselves, and in part because they don't want their high growth renewables biz to get sucked down the drain by the stranded assets of the rest of the company, should the evolution happen faster than they planned for.
In a market where kwh sales are flat or falling, and the price of both small-scale PV and grid storage if falling an order of magnitude or more faster, betting on there being a market for the output of even the Vogtle plant over the design lifecycle of that plant on which the financial model was based is starting to look like a dubious proposition. It's currently slated to go online in 2019-2020, well beyond the original target date of 2016, but the notion that it will be needed to keep the lights on in 2040 is anything but certain. From a levelized cost point of view it will be the most expensive power on the grid in that time frame. Even batteries + renewables will be cheaper at the ratepayer's end than Vogtle + grid charges by about 2030, with fairly conservative learning curve assumptions.
In most locations in the US currently a gigawatt of distributed rooftop PV is far more valuable to the grid than a gigawatt nuke, since it can't fail all at once, it's output generally tracks the daily load curve, and it takes load off of the grid infrastructure. And it costs less, even without factoring in the grid infrastructure and fast ramping generation required to back up a gigawatt nuke.
The nuclear technology that makes the most sense to me going forward its Transatomic's molten salt reactor design, since it's scalable and can be co-located on existing nuclear reactor sites. The existing nuclear sites already has centuries worth of fuel for the molten salt reactor on hand, in the form of spent fuel rods chillin' in the ponds or sealed up in casks. That keeps the addition grid infrastructure required well bounded, and the fuel is already mined & processed. After the fuel is cycled through the molten salt reactor, exploiting most of the remaining 95% of energy in the fuel, it then only has to be stored for a few hundred years rather than tens of thousands of years before it can be handled safely. Designing storage that's reasonably reliable for 500 years is something humans can do with some certainty, and in many cases that storage can be built on-site, you don't have the transportation/spillage-release expense & worry.
There is no short shrift happening regarding nuclear power, but rather, a sober analysis of the likely scenarios of the evolving grid. It takes too big a bet over too long a time scale to make the economics of nuclear power work without a lot of subsidy safety net in place. Vertically integrated utilities under a regulatory that pays them a guaranteed return on the capital investment are the only ones interested, but that utility model & regulatory structure is going out as fast as the tide that precedes the tsunami.
