I don't think that is how most future grids will work. It's more likely that utilities will sign PPAs for large amounts of wind and solar and then figure out how to fill in the gaps.
You’re trying to win, not trying to understand.
Utilities pay for energy, and they pay for capacity, and they have demand-shedding schemes and so on. This happens today to “fill in the gaps” as you put it. The advent of intermittent renewables doesn’t change that. Sometimes it’s done via explicit markets, sometimes it’s a via a price signal, sometimes it’s done via central planning. But all utilities do this, now.
Individuals wind turbines can’t play in the capacity market, because you can’t rely on a wind tower having wind available when needed. They can’t play in the demand-reduction schemes because they don’t have (much) demand. They’re good at producing energy for cheap on average. I know you know this, because you said as much with your “filling in the gaps”. Wind turbines also make for terrible propellers, but we build them for what they’re good at, not what they’re bad at.
Nuclear plants can play in either the energy market or the capacity market (and I guess demand markets, since they can safely stop cooling idle reactors for a few minutes). You said their operations costs were far more expensive than new wind, and I agree. So nuclear is going to lose badly in the energy market.
The article also says it’s $5/W to build the plant. They’re dispatchable power which means you can build a peaker plant: sit around idle and just split atoms when there’s a gap to fill. I was going through the math to show that nuclear power also loses there, to this year’s batteries or to various others.
