Solar and wind require a huge geographic footprint to generate significant energy. Because of this constraint, the cost of wind and solar is almost entirely opportunity cost, not the mere accounting cost of producing an extra panel/turbine. The basic problem is twofold: First, as you keep adding solar/wind capacity, you inevitably get diminishing returns from worse wind/sunshine conditions, so additional installation is less productive. (Think about solar panels in valleys or windmills in low-wind areas.) Second, as wind and solar cannibalize land area to provide energy, the price of that land increases substantially as other uses are displaced. For example, let's say that a country had to displace 40% of its productive arable land in order to install wind & solar. Then the price of its farmland would skyrocket as the country continued to deploy wind & solar. In both cases, solar and wind become much more expensive per deployed panel than simply the cost per panel, which is indeed pretty inexpensive. FWIW, the article attempts to make this point, but it frankly isn't very well written, and so the point is a bit hard to understand.
As to your point about countries situated for nuclear vs wind+solar, what do you mean? Do you have any metrics? If I were to guess, wind and solar are extremely sensitive to the geography of a country (including physical and political-economic); I'd guess nuclear is mildly sensitive to political geography. Splitting the atom is not significantly harder in Indonesia or Peru than it is in France. The fact that much of French land area is rural might make nuclear marginally more useful there than in a place like e.g. Germany or the UK, with several major cities dotted across the relatively densely populated landscape. (Based on this inference, I'd imagine that the US, China, Canada and Russia would be the top four countries for nuclear, and Monaco or Luxembourg might be the worst?)
> For example, let's say that a country had to displace 40% of its productive arable land in order to install wind & solar.
How do wind turbines take up substantial arable land? The wind farm near the university I went to in Indiana was surrounded by corn fields outside of a little dirt road to each one and a small patch of of unseeded space around each turbine likely for a crane.
I'll agree that wind turbines' effect on arable land is much, much lower than solar. That being said, there is still some effect. After all, the land is rendered useless during installation and certain types of maintenance (maybe these cycles could be scheduled when the land lies fallow), and there has to be certain infrastructure (roads/paths) for maintenance.
I'm not against using wind where it is particularly efficient (old strip or surface mining areas may be particularly great); I just think it needs to make economic as well as ecological sense. Wasting a bunch of industrial capacity (largely powered by fossil fuels still) to create wind and solar energy that are more expensive and less efficient at scale than, say, nuclear seems like a bad idea.
We have a lot of unused land that could be filled with solar panels: rooftops. Until every suitable roof is plastered with them, I don't think that we have a land issue. Similarly for wind, the problem is not that we don't have the land, the problem is NIMBYs that don't want turbines to "ruin their view".
The cost of solar panels themselves is proportional to the surface area, but the cost of installation has to take into account the administrative units because they impact wiring and other equipment. Residential rooftops are thus the ideal surface area if reducing cost is your main metric. There are other reasons, such as decentralization, for which this kind of deployment is interesting.
So I don't disagree with any of what you've said. I'm glad you brought up decentralization, because that's what I think many people actually want. I can't run a nuclear reactor in my back yard, but I could put panels on my roof. In doing so, I'd be somewhat insured against blackouts, "the crap hitting the fan" or whatever else, as well as not writing a huge check each month to the power company.
Some research[1] indicates that solar panels on most roofs could cover about 40% of the US's current power consumption, although the variance is fairly high (California could cover about 74% of its power demand, while Wyoming could cover only 14%). I think 40% would be a great improvement, particularly if it's fairly efficient and not too expensive; I just think we should be open to using things like nuclear for the other 60%+.
As to your point about countries situated for nuclear vs wind+solar, what do you mean? Do you have any metrics? If I were to guess, wind and solar are extremely sensitive to the geography of a country (including physical and political-economic); I'd guess nuclear is mildly sensitive to political geography. Splitting the atom is not significantly harder in Indonesia or Peru than it is in France. The fact that much of French land area is rural might make nuclear marginally more useful there than in a place like e.g. Germany or the UK, with several major cities dotted across the relatively densely populated landscape. (Based on this inference, I'd imagine that the US, China, Canada and Russia would be the top four countries for nuclear, and Monaco or Luxembourg might be the worst?)