Comment by Fazebooking

Building nuclear power stations includes a lot of labor-intensive hard to automate tasks like construction. Baumol's cost disease means it's getting even more expensive: rising general productivity leads to higher wages and higher costs in fields that cannot increase productivity as much as the general economic growth. That's why it's also still cheaper in countries with access to low-cost labor.

SMRs are a try to get out of it by building more but smaller reactors. The reality is however that nuclear has an issue with scaling down. Output goes down way faster than costs and most SMR designs have outputs far greater than what initially counted as an SMR.

Investment in renewable energy already greatly outpaces investment in fossil energy. The economic decision to keep using a fossil system is a different one than having to choose a new one. There's still problems that have no economically competitive renewable solution yet, but a lot of what you are seeing is inertia.

Base load electricity is simply an economic optimisation: demand is not flat, but the cheapest electricity source might only be able to create a relatively flat output. You'll need more flexible plants to cover everything above the base load. If you have cheap gas, base load does not make any sense economically.

For the last two years more than 90% of new power generation capacity added globally was renewable. Est 95% in 2025. So no, new carbon sources are not competitive.

https://www.wri.org/insights/state-clean-energy-charted

> but carbon sources have clearly remained competitive with batteries + solar

That's because carbon sources are almost never made to pay for their externalities (i.e. pollution during energy generation).

Nuclear is expensive even after the reactor is build.

And I wouldn’t call it progress to still rely on steam machines for energy

> If we start actually building reactors the cost will come down.

Why would I invest then if it can't even pay for itself?

There's the "we forgot" hypothesis, but I think a more realistic hypothesis is the "we got too rich" hypothesis.

Construction productivity has stayed stagnant for more than half a century, while manufacturing productivity has sky rocketed and made us all fabulously wealthy compared to when the first nuclear reactors were built half a century ago.

I don't trust China's public cost numbers as much as I trust their actual capital allocation on the grid. And I will trust GE's numbers once they have actually produced something at those numbers, as pre-build cost estimates for nuclear are not believable due to their extensive track record.

We didn't forget how to do it cheap. The ALARA (As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable) policy simply made it illegal to do it cheaply.