Battery tech is getting super good though, and the materials are recyclable. If solar becomes cheap enough we could even store it in creative (but less efficient) batteries like lake batteries or weight batteries and the like.

You have to over build and you have to diversify. As many different types of generation as you can.

Nuclear probably has a role. However it doesn't fit well in a dynamic generation scenario. It doesn't like just sitting there waiting to fill in the gaps left by solar and wind. It wants to be a full power all the time just due to economics.

If we could get tidal working, that would be superb. Regular, predictable and almost universal.

Solar panels have become more than ten times cheaper than they were a decade ago. They are easily able to gather half the energy of what they did a decade ago in the summer now in the winter.

So even in the winter solar is twice as price efficient.

Yes there is downtime but solar is a fast and cheap way to replace most electricity cost. Then the rest can be fixed with nuclear in 20 years. We need clean cheap energy now and we can mostly get it.

This isn't a problem at City scales and beyond. You just can't buy a bunch of nazi batteries so there isn't a corp greasing politicians to build it.

This is true. I am mostly pro-solar and mostly anti-nuclear, but if we decided to build a huge multi-national plant to combat/reverse global warming and it needed obscene amounts of energy to operate, I think that might be a perfect task for nuclear. The same doesn't hold true for AI data centers though. I hope those guys have to generate their power by daisy chaining potato batteries.

You need to choose a thing to build there is not unlimited budget.

That's an interesting way to look at it. If it's not just about the power and the cost, there are actually a lot of other factors that we have glossed over.

Solar is cooperative and local while nuclear necessitates centralization. In a nuclear future, large nuclear generating corporations are the sellers and we are the buyers. In a solar future, we pool and exchange our power depending on current production ability and current electric need... comrade.

We have started to build the first commercial fusion plants now. You may want to update your rhetoric.