alt Hacker NewsOr just use nuclear as base load, and battery storage as much as you can.
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For countries that can reliably get to 99% hydro, save for some exceptional droughts, "build nuclear" is about the worst advice you can give them.
Nuclear doesn't really solve this particular problem - solar is already cheaper than nuclear, so no one is going to replace their entire solar capacity with nuclear. And nuclear doesn't spin up/down rapidly like natural gas, so its a lousy solution for nighttime.
Or just gradually taper off fossil fuel use until storage and renewables carry everything.
Exactly what "storage" means there is the key, especially at high latitude. Do not assume just batteries.
You don't need battery storage if you've got hydro.
You need solar. Make hydro the backup, fill reservoirs as your reserve and sell extra energy when they're nearly full.
Nuclear takes a week to restart after a shutdown, due to xenon poisoning. It's not reliable base load.
Get a drought and you have to shut them down, ask France.
"Base load" is just some nonsense from nuclear fans to get the cost per GWh down.
Nuclear seems to be the worst option:
You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar.
It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.
It's dangerous. For millenia. Vulnerable to terrorism. Enabler of nuclear weapons.
It takes a long time to build and bring online.
It doesn't scale down.
Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?
The economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.