Comment by SirHumphrey 6 hours ago
The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive at the present and would the price of uranium rise enough that breeders would become economically viable most countries would just stop bothering with nuclear power altogether.
With recent price drops of solar and storage the difference is now multiples.
This is just plain false. Learn the difference between capacity cost and utilization cost.
Capex and financing is still an issue for many countries, and the opex is a non-zero commitment beyond just the fiscal portion. Most countries that pass-over nuclear energy are fairly justified in their decision. The status-quo is still not super psyched about nuclear proliferation.
There is room to change that, but the cards are very heavily stacked in China's favor. America's bad at the financing part, fickle when it comes to enforcement & supply chains, and ostensibly 2 days away from bailing on the IAEA itself. The proliferation-resistance of Thorium reactors gives China an export trump card that America will struggle to match.
> The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive
Let me fix that for you: "The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive in the bureaucratic high cost litigious Anglo-sphere". And that's pretty much all infrastructure these days, unfortunately.
"China currently has 58 operable reactors with a total capacity of 56.9 GW. A further 30 reactors, with a total capacity of 34.4 GW are under construction" [1]
So, yes, but...
China installed 256GW of solar in the first 6 months of 2025 [2]. A full year estimate of ~350gw. So, the total of all nuclear under construction is 1/10th of the solar they installed in one year.
Don't get me wrong, its cool to see diversity of non fossil sources, glad they are building some, but its a niche in their overall energy buildout. And they can only build that small niche because they dont have to be market priced, its state subsidized.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/ten-new-reactors... [2] https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...
It's not the litigiousness that makes it expensive. France was producing nuclear power plants at a cost per watt that nearly matches modern China. In fact, the mind-numbing cost overruns seem unique to the US.
Here's a Nature article about it:
Seems to me like it's more of a story of corruption than of over-regulation
france cant do it any more either. Flamanville was 12 years late and [1] 400% over budget. EPR2 is already delayed and over budget and they havent even started building yet!
UK cant do it either, see hinkley point c [2]
[1] https://www.nucnet.org/news/long-delayed-nuclear-plant-conne... [2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...
That might be somewhat true but Flamanville was still about $4/watt while Vogtle 3 and 4 (which were built around the same time) were about $15/watt. It's still hard to place France and the US in the same bucket. The US really is uniquely inept at nuclear costs
The cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capex and financing, not opex. Uranium input cost for nuclear power plants is 0.5c/kWh. With breeders you can divide that by about 100.
At least as of a couple years ago nuclear costs just a little more than solar plus storage and that’s not stopping anyone heh.