We do have a HALEU advanced nuclear fuel supply chain issue. Thats being currently tackled. To your advanced reactor point -- they are also still far away so it is plausible that the supply chain catches up before any of the new reactors get deployed - assuming they make it to the finish line.
I should hope they make it to the finish line - I think we could do well with more nuclear providing our backbone of energy.
That really isn't the bottleneck by any means. If there's demand there will be supply.
The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction. For instance there is an unlimited amount of handwringing over a closed fuel cycle costing a little more than an open fuel cycle but nobody points out that the capital cost of the reactor dwarfs fuel cycle costs for any fuel cycle -- no nukes hate reprocessing so they won't point this out and nukes don't want to remind you of the capital cost problem.
For every NPP that's had a nuclear meltdown there have been 20 that had a financial meltdown before they've even turned it on.
It drives me up the wall that big tech companies want to buy "a reactor" or an unspecified "SMR" but never an AP1000 (reactor that's actually been built) or even a BWRX300 (an SMR that might actually get built.) If there wasn't any bullshit a new build AP1000 would probably have a 10 year lag at least but...
... in the current international tariff situation it's almost impossible that any full-size or even moderate-sized reactor will be built in the US in the forseeable future because the US has no super-heavy press that can forge a nuclear reactor vessel. Japan, China, Korea, the UK, and many other countries have them and in the neoliberal world of a year ago we could have just had one made for us and shipped in by boat. The BWRX300 is the only western SMR that is far along and the pressure vessel will be made in Canada -- it's going to cost plenty no matter what but put 35% on top of that and you're doing the no nukes job for them. Way to go.
I want to see it work but I am not seeing realistic plans from the likes of Microsoft and Google, just the hot air from a 100W lightbulb when we really need 10,000,000 times as much heat!
Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.
I've looked long and hard and not found an explanation of the bungling fitting the facts better than that it's like a poker game: the vendor never believed in the sticker price, but the vendors figured that once there were chips in the pot the sunk cost fallacy would mean the buyers would never fold.
Thing is, they do, at least in the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
I think NuScale was trying to be honest about costs but the buyer in Utah built a process in which they could control costs by folding early and they did. Europe, China, and other places have more engineering thinking and less financialization and they're more likely to "stay the course" but as an engineer I'm not sure this is right -- it might work for China but not for Europe.
On one hand I'm glad to see GE get the BWR, especially the work done on ESBWR, back into the game with the BWRX300, but the costs they are quoting are too freaky low and their talk about "design to cost" makes it seem like they just quote the cost number that they need to be competitive with the solar sticker price without storage which will lure in the public as opposed to being competitive to whatever the (unknown) solar + storage sticker price will turn out to be. (e.g. highly variable because it depends by "how frequent blackouts will your accept?")
Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US (by both political parties) and Europe is slowly coming around to allowing new nuclear. NuScale is one of many next gen companies (I hope they're all successful), but the traditional large reactors are also great and can be built cost effectively.
The cost escalations and bungling were well in progress before the TMI. The NRC streamlined the reactor approval processes in the 1980s by trying to separate the licensing of a standard reactor from the licensing of the site -- nobody took them up on the offer.
In the case of AP1000 builds both Sumner and Vogtle were held up for years because they were waiting for Chinese factories to figure out how to make parts, in some cases they never figured it out and they had to source them elsewhere. Factory modular construction was supposed to prevent bungling at the site but replaced it with bungling at the factory.
In theory the factories got up the learning curve and if somebody ordered another AP1000 it would be different, in practice the AP1000 is a Chinese reactor and the Chinese gave up on it for the Hualong One which there are (oddly enough) two designs for, which goes back to the designs the French were using back when they were building many plants on time and on budget... which is maybe a good thing, but they look pretty quick to move on to the Hualong Two and before they get up the learning curve on that one they'll be switching to the Three...
I'll agree that the Europe hired somebody who thinks like Amory Lovins to design the EPR and really did bungle the politics more than the engineering, but that's not the story in the US.
This sounds like utter bullshit. Got references?
Bar graphs showing decreasing regulatory cost on page 6. Pretty dramatic recent change.
https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources...
However they can't even put up wind turbines anymore, due to NIMBY issues, environmental concerns and whatnot. We had a ton of such projects but it's just about ground to a halt now.
And since our distribution network sucks, we've had a ~100x price difference between north and south for a long time now due to that, you can't just put it in the middle of nowhere.
As such I have very little faith they'll manage to put up a nuclear reactor in the near future, at least not close to initial cost and time. And none of that has to do with the details of building a nuclear reactor.
That said, there's change on the horizon. At least more and more people seem to be realizing that if they don't want wind turbines, they don't want huge swathes of solar panels and they don't want to alter more rivers then there's not a lot of options left on the table.
The right thing to do with something like the Vogtle plant for example would be to keep building them since you've just paid some very expensive costs learning what causes delays, but the knowledge of what gets the plant built - because it was built - is still there and fresh.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...
The problem is also: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?
But the people building power generation are doing it on a for-profit basis. Since solar is cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy, simpler to maintain and so on, that's what for-profit people build.
In other words, on the one hand you have large generators, requiring years of planning & permitting, a decade of construction, endless court battles from the anti-nuclear folks, generating returns 15 years from now, competing with the exact opposite (cheap, quick to build, beloved by eco folks, easy to run and maintain, off the shelf parts etc).
From a capital point of view its a no brainer. Capital follows profit, and solar is very profitable.
Nuclear may be good policy. Base Load may be very desirable. But unless govt is putting up the capital it just won't get funded. (Nuclear plants are being built, like in China, but using govt capital, which sees a return in more than just cash terms.)
There are lots of strong arguments for Nuclear. But Nuclear proponents need to address the capital requirements above all. Until the capital problem is solved, every other argument is useless.
If that's really the case then a Gen 4 reactor that runs at higher temperature, uses printed circuit or other advanced heat exchangers and a Brayton cycle gas turbine could win on the capital cost but it's easier said than done. There's not a lot of hope I think the LWR but the BWRX300 is at least trying to do it by deleting the heat exchanger and the only way you're going to get costs down radically will be by deleting things. Commercial Gen 4 reactors are at least 20 years out and we should have gotten started 20 years ago.
The timing undermines this theory. The US added one nuclear reactor to the grid in 1996 then zero until 2016 (sort by first grid connection date here):
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
The US built an additional 58 coal generating units between 1995 and 2009 (see section "Age comparison of coal plants"):
https://www.gem.wiki/Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants
Combined cycle natural gas units were already cheaper to build in 1995, but the gradually rising natural gas prices over the next ~12 years meant that coal could still compete on cost for electricity generation. The cheap fuel for coal units counterbalanced the slower, more expensive construction process. It wasn't until fracked natural gas drove fuel prices down that coal unit construction ended in the US.
The natural gas plants without steam turbines are precisely the load-following plants that run for a fraction of the time (or at a fraction of their capacity); the relative weight of capital vs. fuel costs is inverted. (Or those, like xAI in Memphis, which are rapidly assembled in rushed desperation. I wonder if that will be a trend in the datacenter boom: designs limited, not by costs under normal market conditions, but bottlenecks affecting rushed projects. Nuclear SMR's would seem to be worst at this—the designs they expect to use haven't even been built yet!)
It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel. Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.
It's a cost reduction, but likely not radical when talking about a nuclear power plant. For a cost breakdown of a nuclear plant see
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
So the "conventional island", which would include the steam turbines, condensers, generators etc. is about 15% of the cost. Reduce that to a 1/3 the size, and cost drops to 5% of the total, a savings of 10%. Probably even not that much, since a steam turbine 1/3 the size probably costs more than 1/3 the cost of a "1/1" size turbine. And then the remaining 2/3 of the power output would have to be generated some other way, so would shift cost somewhere else. Of course, some part of the cost of the nuclear island can be attributed to steam production as well. In any case, all in all I don't see this as making or breaking the economics of a nuclear plant. The issues that cause nuclear plant costs to skyrocket lie elsewhere (and no, just blaming regulations is overly simplifying it as well, though a popular scapegoat).
(I'm not sure, but I suspect what's making coal non-competitive with gas isn't so much the steam turbines, but rather that there's more labor and machinery involved in burning coal than gas, from mining, transportation, pulverizers, and then all kinds of exhaust gas treatment used at least in the civilized world, ash handling etc.)
> It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel.
Yes, that's true. The BWRX300, which of the current crop of SMR's is probably the one with the most realistic prospects of actually being built somewhere, is a BWR, and the maker claims one reason for the supposedly good economics is that they have spent a lot of effort on minimizing construction cost and equipment needed. We'll see, I guess. I think historically the economics of BWR's vs PWR's is mostly a wash.
> Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.
The follow-up ASTRID project, which never left the drawing board, used a sodium-air (or might have been nitrogen, to avoid issues with trace contaminants in air since it was all closed cycle anyway?) heat exchanger and Brayton cycle turbomachinery, to avoid any potential issues with sodium and water. I think it was supposed to have slightly lower thermal efficiency than an equivalent steam plant, but maybe somewhat lower capital cost.
So yes, when SMR's are "off the shelf" (aka from "order" to producing) , including permitting, construction etc, within a couple years then they are appealing.
I don't think we're quite there yet.
Storage is making great strides but for it to get good enough to fully convert the grid we need qualitative advances in the underlying technology, not just manufacturing scale driving down prices.
If you were building a grid from scratch in a typical American region, and you were aiming for lowest cost, you'd overbuild solar enough that it handles 100% of demand on a sunny evening, add enough wind to handle 100% of demand on a dark + windy evening, then add about 3 days of battery storage. That'll supply you over 95% of your energy needs.
But that's not 95% of the power, it's 100% of the power 95% of the time. So you also need to supply 100% of the power 5% of the time somehow else. That's not 100% of peak, since peak is during air conditioning demand when solar works, but 100% of almost peak.
The cheapest way to do that is low efficiency single cycle natgas. CCS natgas is 1/20th the cost of nuclear, and single cycle is about half the cost of CCS.
So if you make 2.5% of that nuclear, you've doubled the cost. And you've saved a few hours worth of carbon emission, 2.5% of 5%.
If you want to be carbon-neutral, you use syngas instead of natgas. Yes, syngas is 6X as expensive, but fuel is not the main cost of a peaker plant running <= 5% of the time.
From a purely financial point of view, base load is not appealing. Whereas cheap solar is appealing. If I have a billion$ to invest, I know which one I'm choosing. I'm maximizing return, not "societal good". Which is why govt is best placed to build base load, since they optimize for societal good, not profit.
To make base load appealing to investors we need expensive power at night. But that's countered by local battery storage.
To be clear, this is not a "what we need" argument. It's a capital argument. Private Power suppliers chase profit, and there's more profit in daytime power than nighttime power.
Wait, what? Who is going to accept having no power at night at their house? Ignoring the fact that the intra-utility trade does provide a direct economic incentive, nobody is going to live somewhere the power companies can’t keep the lights on 24 hours a day most days (in the developed world anyway).
Consumers may, or may not, have a choice of power providers. They can choose to "accept" what is on offer, or remove themselves from the grid. But they have very little negotiating power.
Actually it's pretty easy for (residential and office consumers to spend their own capital on batteries and inverters. Most homes consume (or can be set to consume) reasonably low power at night. A 20 kw/h battery will cover most homes easily.
(Solar panels aren't necessary for this.)
The capital cost, and savings therefrom, put a hard limit on what suppliers can charge for night time power. And of course storage is just as attractive to suppliers. (More capital-attractive than say a nuclear plant.)
As consumers we are used to simply announcing our needs. And assuming companies will expend any capital necessary to meet those needs. In practice it doesn't work that way, as rural phone/internet/cable consumers will testify.
Once you see electricity generation as a capital issue, not a consumer issue, things get clearer.
In a world where both solar and wind are massively cheaper, that entire paradigm collapsed. Even more so when you can reuse the same hydro and gas that was working as peaking as "firming" to complement the new model.
I believe Rolls Royce is pretty close as well. But both have yet to deploy a single working example. And it doesn't seem we are anywhere close to see one yet.
> easily
That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.
In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.
In the long run solar power will kill fossil fuels, but we desperately need a bridge to get us there and not destroy the carbon balance in the atmosphere. Nuke is that bridge.
Define "expensive". Over what timescale? Have you seen https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
"Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier."
This is right now, July 2025. The costs of batteries continue to fall. How much cheaper will batteries be by the time we start churning out SMRs fast and cheap?
By all means keep beavering away at nuclear. Its time will come one day. But I won't hold my breath for it to solve the climate problem in the next 10 years.
Storage could get there, but I don’t think it’s credible that manufacturing scale alone will solve the problem. We probably need some new, qualitatively different chemistries to become viable for solar to be viable for the whole grid. From a technical perspective the nuclear plants we could build in the 1960s could do it, whether we can still build them (no matter if the barrier is regulatory or practical) is another question.
How will you get me with rooftop solar and a home battery to buy your extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when I have my own imperfect solution almost the entire year?
Scale this up to a society adding onshore and offshore wind and you quickly realize that the nuclear plant will have a capacity factor at 10% or so.
Vogtle with a 20% capacity factor costs somewhere like 85 cents per kWh, or $850 per MWh.
Nuclear power due to the massive CAPEX is the worse solution imaginable to fix renewable shortcomings.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
Yet, most people live in cities, with plenty of appartement or shared houses where most of the requirements are just not feasible. And the trend isn't going in reverse.
So yes, YOU, may have your own individualistic solution but clearly, it's not something that is suitable for most people. Considering you do not have a real horse in the race, you should quit arguing and enjoy your own egotistical "solution" and let people who want to live collectively decide what's best for them.
The price dropped 22% in a year. Next year it could be the same price in "somewhat sunny" places.
Surely you don't need to power 100% of winter hours with summer sunshine. Electricity isn't grain to be stored in a silo.
Most places humans live in also get sunshine in the winter. Less sunshine admittedly, but that's where overbuilding panels and interconnecting grids comes in. And even dark, cold places get windy.
Or overbuild renewables reducing the seasonal variations. In cost terms when compared to nuclear power those would be insignificant.
With fossil based energy systems we didn’t match production capacity to consumption 100% with peakers having low capacity factors.
But somehow we can’t overbuild a kWh and need massive seasonal storage when it comes to renewables.
Also, 4 hours is the target Jigar Shah talks about for getting solar to a load factor roughly equal to most thermal plants.
Also, I believe that’s 4 hours on the nameplate of the variable generation, not 4 hours on the entire grid load. People generally aren’t advocating for going fully variable generation.
https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...
Also please give a source as to why the US grid would need 5 TWh of battery storage. So we know it is not simply a number you invented out of thin air to say ”impossible!!!!”
For say an AI training-oriented data center, you could scale down the power usage when supply is limited. You could change power limits on the CPU/GPUs, put the machines in sleep mode or powered off entirely. So the required storage would just be a slightly bigger UPS.
Not sure if the economics works out, but at least technically it's possible as it's more flexible than user-based loads.
Load throttling is one of those ideas that seems great as long as someone else is doing it.
If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.
Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.
I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.
So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.
This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.
I'm really happy I got to speak to such and adult then. Fuck you too.
No.
As I'm fond of saying, environmentalists didn't kill nuclear. I'm not denying they had motive. But they lacked means. They can't stop anything else they've set their minds to: fossil fuels, automobiles, deforestation, industrial livestock farming. Even whaling is alive ffs.
No, there was another party with both motive (competition) and means (lots of cash and political influence) to do the deed: the fossil fuel industry. And nuclear didn't help itself with accidents (and ensuing costly clean ups, one of which helped take down the Soviet Union), and budget overruns even when things went smoothly. Both found a convenient fall guy: the green movement.
Tl;dr nuclear hasn't grown because of money. It cost too much, and the competition had the cash to slander its reputation.
FFS no. This is the reason environmentalists don't trust the nuclear industry.
(Hell, seawater is already ~3.3 * 10^-9 uranium.)
There. No more silly anti nuke gotcha. You can give up on that one permanently.