The helpfulness or otherwise of the criticism depends on whether it's valid, correct and/or constructive. It is possible to bash something in a constructive way. Socratic method and all that.

It is the way forward if you want a reliable grid. Solar and wind are intermittent, and the storage technology we would need to make them the primary source of power just doesn't exist yet.

Nuclear power output is incredibly stable but that can be an issue in itself. Produces energy when we don't need it.

The solution will probably be nuclear for base, renewable for excess and storage to balance the difference.

But talk is cheap, lets actually do it.

> Produces energy when we don't need it.

Channel the excess into carbon removal. What's there to loose?

Or hydrogen and synthetic fuels... It is not like we do not have options where to spend energy if it was reasonably available.

What do you know about this topic? How much can nuclear ramp up and down to follow demand?

Nuclear can ramp up and down very quickly. The only issue is that fuel costs are negligible, so ramping down does not save money.

There are a few ways to control nuclear power plant output. You can send the steam someplace else and the generator turns slower. You can also moderate the nuclear reaction using control rods.

Abundant energy doesn’t really sound like a problem to me

You could, and in some cases it makes sense. But relying on nuclear alone is simpler and often more cost-effective.

What happens if a nuclear power plant in your area has to be shut down for maintenance?

There's usually more than one plant, and each plant usually has more than one unit (so they go on a sort of rota), and the maintenance is planned months in advance.

The nuclear have capacity factor of 90%+ meaning that on average they produce power 90% or more of all the hours in year, including maintenance. Just build multiple reactors and stagger the maintenance windows so they do not substantially overlap or match the peak demand periods on yearly scale. And "plant" can consist out of multiple independent reactors.

Ever heard of wires? You can send electricity over them.

These are nuclear wires, right? Because apparantely this does not work for solar and wind as I understand?

Most of the time when it's night where you are, it's also night 100 miles away.

Yes.

Why do wind generators need those but not other types of generators?

They don't. Most wind turbines use electrically excited induction generators. Wind generators containing permanent magnets account for a minority of the market, used mostly for offshore wind (due to reduced maintenance requirements) and in China (due to discounted rare earth element pricing for domestic users).

https://www.evwind.es/2017/05/31/rare-earths-and-wind-turbin...

It's a fair question, and the answer is linked to sheer numbers.

Currently it takes a forrest of wind generators, each on a tower, to replace a single (albeit much larger) generator continously and precisely spun as a steam turbine from (say) coal fired heat sources.

Solar takes acres of rare eath films, and solar+wind needs some form of load smoothing via energy storage so there's additional demand if massive battery banks are used (pumped hydro, heat in sodium, other alternatives exist but not always applicable).

I thought solar farms were switching to mirrors concentrating heat on a superheated salt solution.

That's a goal of some that shows promise but so far to date concentrated solar power schemes (of various kinds) have only reach < 10 GW (in total, globally) last I checked [1].

Photovoltaics, by comparison [2]:

    Solar PV generation increased by a record 179 TWh (up 22%) in 2021 to exceed 1 000 TWh. 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv

All up a hell of a difference (so far) in generation capacity.

In an ideal future we'll see a lot more large CSP plants making better per GW usage of rare earths.