Comment by cpursley 6 hours ago
> 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...
Comparing nuclear reactor capacity to solar capacity is misleading because renewable capacity dramatically overstates actual generation. IIRC The capacity factor for solar ranges between %5-%25 of total capacity generated.
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 UK does the same thing. In fact, its across the entire west. Its almost as if absurd over-regulation is expensive. The Vogtle plant construction for example had to deal with 3 different tranches of changes to the design caused by regulators. Its not corruption, its over-regulation. If it is corruption, it is corrupt politicians intentionally over-regulating because their backers make lots of money extracting FFs.
Flammanville 3 was about €14/W, or about $16/W.
They’re not financially attractive in other parts of the world either. China, a zero litigation single party state, is building some but a tiny % compared to their renewable buildout