Exactly. Electricity is fungible and so is capital. Spend the capital on the technology that arrives soonest with the least capital.
Cost comparisons for nuclear are also dubious. The French are discovering their decommissioning costs are a multiple of what they predicted. Who, using what cash-generating capability, is going to pay for that?
And where to reprocess or stash the waste?
What we are seeing with uranium fission plants being touted as new tech is an attempt to forget the PWR uranium fission problems. TBF it is not for the sodium-cooled uranium reactor people to solve all the problems. But those problems still need solving.
Storage in the form of batteries, pumped storage, hydrogen, or ammonia works. It is needed more for renewables than for nuclear, but nuclear is hard to throttle to a fine granularity like fossil fuel plants.
Anyway, I should have said power generating capacity is mostly fungible. You can mostly replace any capacity with a different kind, within some limits, the same way money isn't perfectly fungible if you need currency conversion, have FDI limits, repatriation limits, etc.
Cost comparisons for nuclear are also dubious. The French are discovering their decommissioning costs are a multiple of what they predicted. Who, using what cash-generating capability, is going to pay for that?
And where to reprocess or stash the waste?
What we are seeing with uranium fission plants being touted as new tech is an attempt to forget the PWR uranium fission problems. TBF it is not for the sodium-cooled uranium reactor people to solve all the problems. But those problems still need solving.