Peter Laing said :
“All irrelevant innuendo useless for options comparisons unless you give the cost of electricity on an LCA basis (including all costs) on a properly comparable basis with other options. Every time you do such properly comparable analyses you find a large proportion of nuclear (e.g. 75%) and backed up by hydro where available and by gas where hydro is not viable is the least cost way by far to reduce the emissions intensity of electricity”
Nuclear is a decent technical solution, but in the UK there have had to be commitments to 14.5 cents / kWh price inflation-proofed, for 35 years (i.e. beyond 2050), which makes it much more expensive than 2050 wind and solar is expected to be. Further, although there appear to be good technical solutions to nuclear waste disposal, there is no political solution to it, in that no democratic country in the world has been able to get public agreement as to what should happen to the waste.
Since by 2050 power generation will have to be zero CO2 emissions, then any gas generation would have to be from renewable gas, in which case you come back to using wind and solar as the cheapest means of providing the gas anyway, and might as well use the resources more efficiently to supply the power to the grid directly.