As for the question: a fairly good overview on balancing options and the challenges in decarbonizing the energy system is offered in the 6th assessment report by working group 3 of the IPCC (PDF). See Box 6.8 on page 675, which lists an overview on balancing options, where nuclear power is one of many:
There are many balancing options in systems with very high renewables (Milligan et al. 2015; Jenkins et al. 2018b; Mai et al. 2018; Bistline 2021a; Denholm et al. 2021).
• Energy storage. Energy storage technologies like batteries, pumped hydro, and hydrogen can provide a range of system
services (Balducci et al. 2018; Bistline et al. 2020a) (Section 6.4.4). Lithium-ion batteries have received attention as costs fall and
installations increase, but very high renewable shares typically entail either dispatchable generation or long-duration storage in
addition to short-duration options (Jenkins et al. 2018b; Arbabzadeh et al. 2019; Schill 2020). Energy storage technologies are
part of a broad set of options (including synchronous condensers, demand-side measures, and even inverter-based technologies
themselves) for providing grid services (Castillo and Gayme 2014; EPRI 2019a).
• Transmission and trade. To balance differences in resource availability, high renewable systems will very likely entail investments
in transmission capacity (Mai et al. 2014; Macdonald et al. 2016; Pleßmann and Blechinger 2017; Zappa et al. 2019) (Section 6.4.5)
and changes in trade (Abrell and Rausch 2016; Bistline et al. 2019). These increases will likely be accompanied by expanded
balancing regions to take advantage of geographical smoothing.
• Dispatchable (‘on-demand’) generation. Dispatchable generation could include flexible fossil units or low-carbon fuels such
as hydrogen with lower minimum load levels (Denholm et al. 2018; Bistline 2019), renewables like hydropower, geothermal, or
biomass (Hirth 2016; Hansen et al. 2019), or flexible nuclear (Jenkins et al. 2018a). The composition depends on costs and other
policy goals, though in all cases, capacity factors are low for these resources (Mills et al. 2020).
• Demand management: Many low-emitting and high-renewables systems also utilise increased load flexibility in the forms of
energy efficiency, demand response, and demand flexibility, utilising newly electrified end uses such as electric vehicles to shape
demand profiles to better match supply (Ameli et al. 2017; Hale 2017; Brown et al. 2018; Imelda et al. 2018a; Bistline 2021a).
• Sector coupling: Sector coupling includes increased end-use electrification and PtX electricity conversion pathways, which may
entail using electricity to create synthetic fuels such as hydrogen (Davis et al. 2018; Ueckerdt et al. 2021) (Sections 6.4.3, 6.4.,
6.4.5, 6.6.4.3, and 6.6.4.6).
Deployment of integration options depends on their relative costs and value, regulations, and electricity market design. There is
considerable uncertainty about future technology costs, performance, availability, scalability, and public acceptance (Kondziella and
Bruckner 2016; Bistline et al. 2019). Deploying balanced resources likely requires operational, market design, and other institutional
changes, as well as technological changes in some cases (Denholm et al. 2021; Cochran et al. 2014). Mixes will differ based on
resources, system size, flexibility, and whether grids are isolated or interconnected.
Given the wealth of technological options and developments, why narrow down the view on a single solution and pretend that it is the only one?