It appears to be expensive in the West for now. I'm waiting to see how China's rollout goes before declaring that it's straight up expensive.

Even if you buy into crap like Chinese reactors being less safe or more poorly regulated they should still be a good benchmark for what is necessary to reach scale nuclear reactor production.

Especially their small designs which are expected to be mass produced in factories and shipped to the site rather than built in-place as current Western designs have been been.

Combined with their target reactor numbers should bring down the cost substantially due to economies of scale when producing 200+ of the same reactor.

Only then will we have a decent picture of economics.

Chinese nuclear reactors built in China are completed faster than in other countries, and they probably [1] cost less. But it's not clear that Chinese nuclear reactors built in Western countries would be especially affordable. Consider this recently signed deal to build China's Hualong One reactor in Argentina:

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsargentina-optimistic-ab...

It is supposed to take 8 years to build and cost $8 billion for 1090 net megawatts (1170 gross megawatts) [2]. That's far better than Western AP1000 and EPR projects currently under construction, if it meets its targets. But it's far worse than the planned costs that Western AP1000 and EPR projects had at project start.

Or consider the relative pace of Chinese nuclear and renewable additions in China. China connected a record 8374 megawatts of nuclear power to its grid in 2018 [3]. (In 2021 it connected 2321 megawatts). At a 95% capacity factor, that's about 70 terawatt hours of electricity generated per year. In 2021, China added a record 54880 megawatts of solar power [4]. At a conservative 15% capacity factor, that much solar capacity will generate about 72 terawatt hours of electricity per year. It also added over 47000 megawatts of wind capacity in 2021 [5] which can be expected to yield more than 82 terawatt hours annually at a conservative capacity factor of 20%.

In terms of added electrical output, Chinese renewable projects are outpacing Chinese nuclear projects despite the much lower capacity factors for renewables. I suspect that's because they are much cheaper to build. There may come a saturation point where adding more renewables no longer does anything to displace fossil fuel consumption, because additional supply is all curtailed due to mismatched supply/demand timing, but curtailment can go pretty high (more than 50%) before nuclear yields more marginal decarbonization per dollar of investment.

[1] It's difficult to determine the ground level truth of Chinese project economics. The government is more heavily involved in the economy, press freedom is limited, and language barriers make it hard for people who only read English to keep abreast of what appears in Chinese publications. I am acutely aware that the only reports I read coming out of China are things that somebody else wanted translated into English.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One

[3] https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chinas-solar-power-c...

[5] https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1738591/china-repor...

The most interesting project is the Chinese HTR-PM[1] which is a small ~250MW design that is specifically engineered to be run in the Chinese interior where it will displace coal power plants.

It lacks the more advanced passive safety of molten-salt designs but it's significantly more advanced than reactors being built anywhere else in the world and is a natural stepping stone to molten salt to replace the helium coolant at some stage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM

I think that the HTR-PM is interesting too. I submitted a story about it 6 months ago, but it didn't get a lot of traction here:

"China Is Home to First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29804547

China is also installing enormous amounts of pumped hydro for storage.

China is building all forms of energy as quickly as possible. They are still building coal plants while all this is going on because they are that desperate for additional generation capacity.

It’s true it’s expensive.

But 1. a large part of that is regulatory expenses not inherent to the technology, and 2. are we sure it is uneconomically expensive after taking into account the expenses spared by not completely fucking up our climate stability?

1. then it would be even less politically acceptable, which is already the biggest problem.

2. yes we are sure, because even current green tech — PV and "enough" batteries — is already cost-competitive with nuclear, and we have good reasons to expect both PV and storage to get cheaper.

I doubt it’s a good strategy to put all our eggs in a photovoltaic basket.

I love PV tech, I think it’s incredibly useful for small and medium scale self sustainability. And yes, in many areas it makes sense to dedicate a bunch of space to PVs and energy storage.

But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you massively overbuild capacity you’ll always face a weather threat.

Until we manage to harness nuclear fusion we’ll need nuclear fission along with hydropower to be the backbone of our energy generation.

> I doubt it’s a good strategy to put all our eggs in a photovoltaic basket.

This is why I still support nuclear despite the cost.

Although…

> But PV is inherently intermittent and unless you massively overbuild capacity you’ll always face a weather threat.

isn't strictly true. In a magical alternative reality where we can do mega-projects and can ignore geopolitics, antipodal power grids are technically fine, much cheaper than batteries, and don't need any backups.

(I'm not sure how easy/hard it would be to make one without such assumptions, only that it takes a minimum of about one years' global aluminium production, so treat it as merely an interesting though experiment at this point).

No, we don't need nuclear. Intermittency of renewables is a problem that has solutions, and the cost of those solutions is low enough to render new construction nuclear entirely uncompetitive in the US and Europe, and likely elsewhere. At worst, if the cost estimates of the solutions are grossly underestimated, this just means we're paying a bit more. At the same time, costs of nuclear power plants are consistently grossly underestimated, so one should honestly address the cost risk on both sides.

The economics change very fast if we disallow fossil fuel from being used in the energy grid. The current combination of using wind when the weather is optimal and natural gas/oil when demand exceed production is a very cost effective strategy, and it is this combination that has enabled energy prices at very low levels.

A large reason why nuclear has recently gain a lot of popularity is that wind + natural gas has quickly became very expensive and political damaging. One can no longer just pay Russia for cheap gas and look the other way.