I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
The main problem with nuclear power is that it’s the most expensive form of electricity. People who say otherwise are only looking at the cost of running the generator, rather than including all the true costs involved in generating each watt, which is called the “Levelized Cost Of Electricity” (LCOE)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
So there’s no reason to build any new nuclear generators now that renewables+storage are the cheapest form of electricity, and are also the easiest and fastest to build.
I know nuclear is expensive, but power generation isn’t the only reason to build nuclear reactors. Nuclear power plants basically prop up nuclear science. Without nuclear power plants, you’re hampering the chances of discovering a breakthrough that could lead to cheaper nuclear energy. And you’re pushing back the timeline on fusion.
Also, medical isotopes used for cancer treatments are created in nuclear reactors.
This doesn’t seem like a good argument. More research into renewable and storage technology can also lead to interesting discoveries useful in other fields.
fusion is a pipe dream at this point; nuclear physics has been so thoroughly researched through CERN and other organizations that it’s utterly unlikely that any big break-throughs are gonna happen anytime in the next 100 years.
the only optimization that could still happen is in the reactor design, that is, in everything except the nuclear physics part. stuff like how do you build cheaper plumbing through a 1 m thick concrete wall … not really exciting stuff.
I’m curious how SMRs will end up affecting overall cost of nuclear as well. Once we get into a unit that can be mass produced rather than tailor making each site, I could see the line going down at least a bit and would also allow us to keep pushing those boundaries.
The problem is that LCOE is an imperfect metrics that does not take into account storage properly for grid with high percentage of renewables (that requires significantly more battery storage than current 4h window considered in LCOE). LCOE also does not account completely for time effects associated with matching electricity production to demand. There is no clear metric for this, given that the cost depends on the structure of the grid itself and is specific for each country, but the Wikipedia article you posted show in the graph a very incorrect picture. Renewable (solar and wind) + storage is in the $80–150/MWh range, while nuclear is $130–200+/MWh range. It is worth noticing that nuclear cost is very high in Europe and US but can be actually very cheap (reason why china, the world leader on renewable is also world leader on new power plants). Estimation for new Chinese nuclear is at $62/MWh (https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/REupdate/20240927.php)
All measures are imperfect, that doesn’t mean it’s totally meaningless and should be disregarded. And it also seems like you’re referencing outdated data, as the cost of battery storage seriously decreased in 2025. But by any measure i can find, nuclear is significantly more expensive than renewables+storage. Regarding China, their data is generally not trustworthy on any topic, but yes I’m sure nuclear can cost a lot less there than elsewhere when you can steamroll over the citizens that would be effected by a powerplant’s construction, operation, and waste storage.
I’m not an expert in this at all, but I believe that private capital isn’t investing their own money in new nuclear construction, and that tells the whole story about the cost per watt of nuclear. If nuclear was cheaper per watt after all costs were considered then private capital would be building new nuclear, but they aren’t, so that means it clearly isn’t.
EDIT
I just looked at your link and it pretty clearly says the opposite of everything you said. Quote from the intro of your article:
And
I have never disputed that in general solar+storage is cheaper, I am disputing the data in that Wikipedia article that make it looks like it is 20 times cheaper. It is not that much cheaper, and china build lot of nuclear because grid diversification is more valuable then just making it cheaper. Production cost and energy price are independent variables and nuclear bring energy price down as it stabilizes the grid.
Storage cost is going down, but storage demand by energy produced is going up as you need much more storage then just peak hour demand as you are shutting down load following power plant generator like coal, nuclear and gas.
The link I shared is to provide the reference to $62/MWh stated above.
I am unsure why you bring this up seeing as how nuclear power can not react due to load demand and instead only provides base load power, which means other power sources are required to keep up with transient demand.
Nuclear cannot manage fast transient, but for that we have gas peaker and batteries. But nuclear can indeed work in load following mode, with most modern nuclear power plant being able to reduce the amount of power significantly and circle during the day. The French fleet, for example is required to cycle between 20% and 100% twice a day, within 30 minutes. Modern reactors ramps up at 5% each minute.
That means that they can account for changes in demand. More data here: https://www.nice-future.org/docs/nicefuturelibraries/default-document-library/france.pdf