Adding battery storage is going to be anything but trivial. Existing global battery production amounts to 10-15 minutes of electricity use. And this is assuming a total elimination of EV production while storage is built out.
What a weird thing to say, comparing existing production captaincy to what could be... Existing SMR production is what, exactly?
Batteries have a clear scaling path, plenty of materials, and are growing 10x at a predictable rate.
Scaling batteries is utterly trivial compared to the challenges facing SMRs.
The historical record is right there for everyone to see. Batteries are a serious industry, at a serious scale, with serious engineering and real timelines and improvements. The entire nuclear industry are charlatans and lightweights compared to what's happened in batteries and renewables. Which is a shame, because nuclear could have had a chance, perhaps.
We don't need small modular reactors, we have much more experience building larger PWRs - and regulation effectively mandates it the way that each plant needs to pay more than a third of a billion dollars in fees to get certified. Had nuclear production continued at the same pace it did during the 1960s and 70s in the US, we'd have had a completely decarbonized grid by now. And that's exactly what happened in France: they continued building nuclear reactors and reduced fossil fuels to essentially zero. Compare that with Germany, renewables' posterchild, that still uses combustibles for most of its energy production - wind and solar is only 30% of its energy mix.
Scaling batteries is the opposite of trivial. I don' think you comprehend the mismatch between our battery supply and what grid storage demands. The US consumes about 500 GWh of of electricity every hour. This is more than the cumulative global battery production in all of 2021 [1]. And the cost of batteries has stopped shrinking and started rising [2]. The reality is that we'll be hard-pressed just to keep battery production growing fast enough to satisfy EVs. Lithium battery production will probably double or triple, but that's still not enough to make grid storage feasible.
How many countries have provisioned a day's worth of electricity storage? Half a day? An hour? For all the talk about nuclear power being charlatans and lightweights, no country at al has produced the majority of its electricity from intermittent sources. But nuclear has [3]. Pretty good for a bunch of charlatans!
