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Comment by SirHumphrey | Hacker News Reader

The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive at the present and would the price of uranium rise enough that breeders would become economically viable most countries would just stop bothering with nuclear power altogether.

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The cost of nuclear power is almost entirely capex and financing, not opex. Uranium input cost for nuclear power plants is 0.5c/kWh. With breeders you can divide that by about 100.

At least as of a couple years ago nuclear costs just a little more than solar plus storage and that’s not stopping anyone heh.

Capex and financing is still an issue for many countries, and the opex is a non-zero commitment beyond just the fiscal portion. Most countries that pass-over nuclear energy are fairly justified in their decision. The status-quo is still not super psyched about nuclear proliferation.

There is room to change that, but the cards are very heavily stacked in China's favor. America's bad at the financing part, fickle when it comes to enforcement & supply chains, and ostensibly 2 days away from bailing on the IAEA itself. The proliferation-resistance of Thorium reactors gives China an export trump card that America will struggle to match.

With recent price drops of solar and storage the difference is now multiples.

This is just plain false. Learn the difference between capacity cost and utilization cost.

It is LCOE outside of the US tariff bubble.

Go ahead a calculate what co-locating ~$52/kWh BESS systems alongside an utility scale solar install costs per kWh.

https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/26/china-energy-engineering...

> The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive

Let me fix that for you: "The truth is that nuclear power is not that financially attractive in the bureaucratic high cost litigious Anglo-sphere". And that's pretty much all infrastructure these days, unfortunately.

They’re not financially attractive in other parts of the world either. China, a zero litigation single party state, is building some but a tiny % compared to their renewable buildout

They need a lot of energy from a variety of sources. China has 30 or so reactors under construction (half or so of all active projects).

"China currently has 58 operable reactors with a total capacity of 56.9 GW. A further 30 reactors, with a total capacity of 34.4 GW are under construction" [1]

So, yes, but...

China installed 256GW of solar in the first 6 months of 2025 [2]. A full year estimate of ~350gw. So, the total of all nuclear under construction is 1/10th of the solar they installed in one year.

Don't get me wrong, its cool to see diversity of non fossil sources, glad they are building some, but its a niche in their overall energy buildout. And they can only build that small niche because they dont have to be market priced, its state subsidized.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/ten-new-reactors... [2] https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...

Comparing nuclear reactor capacity to solar capacity is misleading because renewable capacity dramatically overstates actual generation. IIRC The capacity factor for solar ranges between %5-%25 of total capacity generated.

Yes yes, one of the usual reflexive context free points repeated every time solar comes up. Whatever the actual capacity factor is(5% is not a serious number ), I’m sure chinas energy planners know that, it’s hardly a gotcha. And still they’ve choose to build solar at a volume massively dwarfing nuclear

(Edit: cycomanic explained it much better and more patiently than me)

I don't think it's reflexive to point out that evaluating the headline numbers like that is misleading. People who are new to the topic will misinformed if they think you're describing an apples to apples comparison.

The issue is that even with your correction the point stands. You weren't refuting, you were being irrelevant.

That doesn't significantly change the argument. Most solar plants have capacity factors of around 20% (5% might apply to home systems, but not commerical), compared to nuclear which has around 80%. So a factor of 4. So numbers change a bit on the previous poster, China just installed 3x more solar in 1 year than all the nuclear under construction, or they essentially installed the same amout of solar in one year as all existing and under construction nuclear combined. And if we look at projections, next year they likely will install twice as much solar...

While China is often put up as the poster child for nuclear power, they are actually a great example of how nuclear is being overtaken by renewables. China's 2019 plan was that by 2035 nuclear would account for ~8% of generated electricity (up from ~5%). Since then percentage dropped to 4.5% (and the drop seems to be accelerating). Unless something dramatically changes nuclear will account for less than 4% (not the planned 8%) of generated electricity by 2035. All that is due to the raise of renewables (largely solar). I suspect we will not see China build close to those projected 200 GW and the percentage to be even lower, just due to the exponential growth in solar.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

As if their massive solar production (and innovation) is market based...

It's not the litigiousness that makes it expensive. France was producing nuclear power plants at a cost per watt that nearly matches modern China. In fact, the mind-numbing cost overruns seem unique to the US.

Here's a Nature article about it:

https://archive.ph/Tpe0j

Seems to me like it's more of a story of corruption than of over-regulation

france cant do it any more either. Flamanville was 12 years late and [1] 400% over budget. EPR2 is already delayed and over budget and they havent even started building yet!

UK cant do it either, see hinkley point c [2]

[1] https://www.nucnet.org/news/long-delayed-nuclear-plant-conne... [2] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...

That might be somewhat true but Flamanville was still about $4/watt while Vogtle 3 and 4 (which were built around the same time) were about $15/watt. It's still hard to place France and the US in the same bucket. The US really is uniquely inept at nuclear costs

Flammanville 3 was about €14/W, or about $16/W.

https://mastodon.energy/@Sustainable2050/113695635521714572

The UK does the same thing. In fact, its across the entire west. Its almost as if absurd over-regulation is expensive. The Vogtle plant construction for example had to deal with 3 different tranches of changes to the design caused by regulators. Its not corruption, its over-regulation. If it is corruption, it is corrupt politicians intentionally over-regulating because their backers make lots of money extracting FFs.

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