the half trillion comment came from the original article, that stated an estimated cost of 440 billion.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
Without battery or natural gas, solar and wind are not useful. You have to have some sort of backup, sufficient to avoid brownouts or blackouts, and so you end up with the full capitalization and maintenance cost of not-solar anyway.
To properly compare solar with nuclear, you must add on the cost of battery and / or natural gas (or equivalent fast backup), at which point nuclear is cheaper.
That's at least half the cost of nuclear, maybe as much as a fifth.
PV capacity costs about 1 dollars per Watt and achieves a 20-25% capacity factor. In the article they say less than 0.5 dollars per watt of nuclear. If they can achieve that, it's obviously cheaper to go nuclear than PV. Nuclear has higher operating costs, true, but also a 90% capacity factor, meaning you need 5 times less capacity installed than PV. 1200 GW of nuclear for 440 billions is the equivalent of 5000GW of PV for 5000 billions. This is just to produce the same amount of energy, at any time during the day/year, before considering the cost of storage or intermittent power on the grid.
I truly hope China can pull this off at the advertised price. Because of the sheer size of the initiative they might be able to just do it using the economy of scale. France did it in 10 years in the 70s-80s, no reason China can't do it today.
We need all the energy sources, being PV+wind+battery purists won't be enough.
I found this article with a more global take https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Apparently France managed to build it's nuclear plants at a cost of 1 dollar per Watt. Going to 0.5 dollars today might be a challenge for China, even with economies of scale. The article estimated 2.5 per Watt.
Even at 2.5 USD per Watt installed, that would still be about the same price as PV installed. But you gain stability in the grid for a slighter higher operating cost.
It costs 1 dollar to install 1 W of solar PV with no batteries. To include a 2-4 hour battery it's double that. Long term storage for day to day or seasonal is much much more, and likely impossible to do with the current tech.
And in regards to France, compare France's electricity cost with Germany's, Nuclear clearly beats PV and wind on cost. People will say that wholesale prices are the same, and Germany pays such a huge price solely because of taxes. But the point is...those taxes are so high in order to support renewables subsidies.
This being China, all comparisons are moot. They can reduce costs significantly, like they showed with the PV modules. They are the ones that truly commoditized the modules.
It costs $40/MWh to install solar with batteries[2]. That's 35 cents per watt.
1: https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/888004cf-1a38-4716-... 2: https://www.energy-storage.news/developer-8minute-says-more-...
I think you should understand first what MW and MWh mean. One costs 1 million dollars to install, and then will proceed to produce 8000 hours per year divided by the capacity factor. So about 2000 hours * 1 MW = 2000 MWh per year. At a price of 5 cents per KWh, you can sell that for 100k dollars.
MWh is a much better figure than W when comparing disparate technologies because it takes into account capacity factor, operating costs and disposal costs as well as installation costs. It also relates directly to the price consumer pays. It's also why all the links are pricing in MWh.
So 1 watt of PV with a capacity factor of 33% and 30 years of lifetime would generate 86.7KWh. $20/MWh is thus $1.80/W total for installation, operating and decomissioning costs.
If China can build 150 reactors for $500 billion when it costs the west over $20B to build a single one, then yes nuclear is cheaper than solar.
33% capacity factor is unheard of, US is around 25%, and even that is higher than most of the world. Not even excellent desert states in the US don't break 30% https://www.statista.com/statistics/1019796/solar-pv-capacit...
Currently the West has massively inflated prices because there is no economy of scale. A planned economy + economies of scale might just pull it off. Especially if they're going to build the nuclear plants in factories, like the west is trying to do now. We'll see.
I'm personally rooting for all the technologies, except coal. Even gas is good as a temporary measure - it allows us to get off coal faster.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343184782_Capacity_...
People significantly overestimate the amount of batteries that a solar+battery project requires. All you need is enough batteries to handle a single night (and demand is low at night), and enough overcapacity to handle a moderately cloudy day. That'll get you above nuclear's 90% capacity factor.
Those batteries only add $20/MWh to the project. https://www.energy-storage.news/battery-storage-at-us20-mwh-...
Btw, ask France about cost of nuclear, I've heard their new reactors are absolutely in time and budget ;)