For China, nuclear power plants are still not very important, they build a lot new coal power plants.

"2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024"

https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/built-to-peak-coal...

The reason why people tend to get a bit cheerleadery about nuclear power is because it has some great PR and it resonates with them.

It needs the PR because it is so unconscionably expensive. The public needs to be primed to consent to indirect and direct subsidies.

The reason China, US, France, it is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with nukes.

The reason Sweden, Poland, Iran, etc. build a few plants is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with a nuclear weapons program they might want in a hurry one day. It's always obvious for those countries who the existential threat is.

Yeah, apparently Hinkley may be partly to keep the nuclear weapon skills. (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...)

very little supply chain is shared with weapons, dont spread nonsense. If you want weapons it's far cheaper to have just an enrichement facility exactly for that.

And nuclear is cheap. Look at lazard estimate for existing fleet. Or open swiss data. Or even german data

Nuclear costs about 5x as much as solar and wind according to Lazard. This doesnt even include catastrophe insurance (taxpayers are on the hook in the event it goes boom and there's an $800 billion fukushima style cleanup fee).

I dont think it was price or global warming that got Poland suddenly interested in 2023. They dont want to build a nuke today but if their existing nuclear umbrella suddenly gets yanked away...

You talk about new projects based on Vogtle costs. You need to look at the Lazard lcoe for existing fleet which didnt have such delays.

Fukushima cleanup could have costed much less. Jp govt wanted it to be expensive.

"They dont want to build a nuke today but if their existing nuclear umbrella suddenly gets yanked away..." - again, it's unrelated. If you want weapons you can have some secret enrichemnt facility for that. Much cheaper. Npp without enrichment are pointless anyway for weapons due to parasitic isotopes.

We can both build Nuclear that is safe and also build it faster. Its a matter of political will and reasonable regulation. Nations looking on the 100 year horizon would build nuclear and they would be newer and safer nuclear as time goes on. The next generation of reactors are safer and promise to be cheaper to build but the last of the GEN4 nuclear still are safe especially when we actually pay to have nuclear regulator inspectors. The things we are willing to be cheaper on are always the inspectors but never the permitting its so backwards.

I don’t see why you would look at nuclear at all on a 100 year horizon. At that timescales you gotta look at the fundamentals:

1. We’ve got a free fusion reactor in the sky and collecting and storing that energy is fundamentally cheap. Especially in a long term perspective when the materials needed to store the energy will be mostly recycled and practically free.

2. We’ve got a free fission reactor under our feet. Drilling deep enough expensive now but there’s no reason it needs to be. Se Quaise for progress in that area.

3. In a 50 year timeframe we don’t have any spare capacity to add more global warming from the thermal forcing of thermal power plants. Yeah you heard me right, thermal power plants contribute directly to global warming, and the effect is surprisingly significant. The good news is the effect disappears rapidly when you shut them down, unlike greenhouse gases. And we should certainly never shut down any nuclear power plants until we’ve eliminated greenhouse gas emissions. But at the same time, while we have an insane amount of greenhouse gases lingering in the atmosphere we can’t afford adding global warming from thousands of new nuclear reactors… like some nuclear proponents would have us do.

A 100 years from now, if we’ve brought greenhouse gases down again, that’s when we can start considering adding significantly more nuclear power. Though I doubt there will be any interest. Makes sense for space travel though.

I’m pro nuclear despite all that. But more from an R&D perspective.

1 - fusion reactor in the sky is not that easy to capture 24/7 due to nights/winter. BESS can partially alleviate the problem, not solve it. 2 - geothermal has an inconvenient property to lower output over time. 3 - nuclear requires far less grid investments, far less mining/materials 4 - If we are serious about nuclear we should investigate up to smallest detail how hitachi deployed first ABWR for such a short time/low cost and do that in series, en masse. I can bet in 20y Germany will still have far worse emissions than France

I missed this, the point was more long term view. If you want a robust power network that doesn't kill the planet you really need to consider a timescale where climate changes effects are observable I'd argue that is a 100 years. We are debately between 100-200 years into the industrial revolution and climate changes worse impacts at still 20-50 years off (Not a lot of time to reinvent the economy just to be clear). But in that conception of time 100 year time frame seems very reasonable.

If you just look 10 years ahead you'd probably conclude solar, wind and maybe hydro is enough because short term thinking will always undersell the climate risk in my opinion. My justification for this thought is look at climate deniers arguments its always about magnitude and speed now because its the last effective argument.

Nuclear cost recovery and profit function for proven GEN4 is also on the 20-30 year timescale (depending on how much cost overruns they've faced it could be 50 years for bad cases) not the 5-10 year timescale. Making them unattractive financially speaking. Despite the fact that after that time which most US reactors are they are extremely profitable for the operator because the fuel -> power out is incrediblely in their favor. Ultimately, it takes longer term risk evaluation to show their benefits but they are undeniable and will be involved in solving the climate crisis.

it's strange you mention HPC but dont mention the costs of chinese nuclear...

British taxpayer will pay even more pr kwh for some offshore and tidal projects