It's a world-wide competition to generate the most expensive electricity! The record is currently held by Vogtle in Georgia US, but Ontario Canada is trying to take the crown by spending $500B on nuclear.
At a certain point, dollars are funny money if you are destroying the environment to save a few now by generating baseload with a carbon-producing tech.
Of course, let’s build the safest and most efficient nuclear that we can, but “its capex is too high” is not a compelling argument to me.
And to be clear: renewables should form as much of the capacity as possible, but a reliable baseload is obviously still needed.
Baseload was a cost optimization. Back in the day it was cheaper to build coal & nuclear plants that took days to power on. Somebody figured out that if a grid was built of a mix of those cheaper plants and more expensive plants that could start up quicker, it would lower costs. The typical grid was baseload coal and gas peakers. But ~20 years ago gas peakers became cheaper than baseload coal and any need or desire for baseload generation went away.
China is building a lot of coal plants to complement their solar buildout. Notably these are not base load plants. Their new coal plants do not run 24/7, they only run at night.
Similarly, many new nuclear plant designs are not base load designs; they are designs that can be safely and quickly turned on and off.
P.S. the correct term for generation is "non-dispatchable", not "baseload"
That’s baseload! Baseload is load you can’t turn off: the minimum load that’s required in a 24 hour period. It can be fulfilled with non-dispatchable sources, but it need not be. In this case, China is building coal plants to address the baseload that doesn’t go away at night when the solar isn’t producing.
Do you want to hazard a guess as to why?
The answer is because we still do not know how to supply expanding electricity demand with wind, solar and batteries. The side of the story that people on this website love to bring up is the fact that China happens to be the largest builder of solar and wind, which is true, but the increased electricity demand is being met via coal, for the most part.
Because it was only in 2025 that batteries became cheaper than coal, so the lead times involved mean they are still building coal.
They're very rapidly ramping up battery bank installation, it's too early to tell if they're also ramping down coal plant installations, but it seems likely.
It’s being entirely met by renewables.
Baseload won't be price competitive with renewables in average or shiny/windy conditions ever
Opposing nuclear & renewables is stupid. You need both. You need as many power sources as you can, as quick as you can while the resources are available. Energy is not something you leave up to the invisible hand of the market hoping that price competitiveness means that it works well. Lives are at play.
Why do you need both? It's possible to get 99.99% reliability with wind & solar & batteries & weather modelling. There are multiple ways to handle a week long dankelflaute without nuclear: overbuilding, continental scale distribution, lots of batteries, etc. All are cheaper than nuclear.
It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid, even a nuclear dominated one. Local distribution has many single points of failure.
Not to mention the environmental damage from producing and disposing of batteries.
Pumped hydro doesn't need natural flow, because it uses pumps. All it needs is a height differential. Here's 22,000 in Australia alone. There are millions worldwide.
https://arena.gov.au/knowledge-bank/anu-stores-an-atlas-of-p...
Yeah, uh, I'm going to go with the "building a nuclear plant is the safest solution" answer, thanks. Technosolutionism is fun up to a certain point.
>It's possible to get 99.99% reliability [...] It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability out of any grid
Notwithstanding the fact that lol you're happily saying that you're perfectly fine you get 1 hour of complete downtime every year, which fucks over many industries and services, you're ignoring multiple facts: 1/ to ensure safety, that means rolling brownouts when you're at 95% capacity, great solution, 2/ 99.99% works exactly like it does in software: you don't get tiny seconds long drops, you get gigantic, energy grid collapsing catastrophic failures, that are impossible to restart, grid sync because every renewable island is isolated.
>It's also virtually impossible to get more than 99.99% reliability
What kind of incompetent country are you living in? I have had exactly ZERO minutes of power outages for the past 5 years. I'll be generous and include the 30 minutes of downtime for maintenance. The country wide average blackout time is 2m30s, .43 power cuts / person / year. That's 99.996% stability country wide, and that's heavily weighted down by the places that get fucked by a tree collapsing on a transformer station
When batteries are covering 0% of the need, the marginally added battery cycles many times, so the cost is spread over many kwh produced.
When you add batteries to go from 99.98 to 99.99, the batteries cycle only for that 0.01, so the same cost to build them is spread over a much fewer kwh, making each kwh produced a lot more expensive.
Seasonal storage is madness: you charge once and discharge once per year. Pay 100$/kwh to install it, discharge 20 times (20 years, a 5% payback time, which is a bad investment), and you're paying those kwh a 5$/kwh premium on top of the cost of buying the discharged power. If the battery is instead installed to shift the production from 12.00 to 18.00, it cycles 365 times a year, so in 20 years the premium is 0.01$/kwh.
So nucleare doesn't compete with the first 40% of penetration of renewables and the first 30% of battery, it competes with the last 10%, which is still needed to get to 0.
But you can't replace the gas peaker with 3% or 10% nuclear because in essence that gas peaker is supplying 100% of the power 3% to 10% of the time.
So you'd have to build nuclear plants that can supply 100% of the power. But once you have that you might as well use nuclear power 100% of the time because the rest is irrelevant. But that's about as far from cost-optimal as you can get.
As you mentioned, using batteries for seasonal storage is madness. So to get to 100% carbon free you have at least 2 other options:
1. use a different form of seasonal storage. China is experimenting with this. In 2026 they will double the world's pumped hydro storage capacity. But doubling isn't a lot -- the world doesn't have much pumped hydro. But it does mean they might start doing it at China scale in a few years.
2. Overbuild to avoid the need for seasonal storage. Solar works on cloudy days and in the winter. It just doesn't work very well. So you need a lot of it. Which is expensive, but still a heck of a lot cheaper than batteries for seasonal storage.
In reality, most places will probably say that 95% or 99% carbon reduction is good enough and keep their backup natural gas generators around for the occasional dankelflaute.
There is not a single analysis out there that tackles the twin problems of meeting growing electricity demand with a power source that depends on an uncertain and changing climate.
You say "occasional" dunkelflaute, but we have no idea whether occasional is once a season or once a decade.
This is exactly where nuclear shines, because although it is expensive, it insulates a country against the vagaries of external forces. Whether or not that guarantee is worth the price tag is the question a lot of governments are grappling with and they mostly seem to agree that the value is indeed worth the cost.
Yes, these are things we know with a high degree of statistical confidence. Many locations have hundreds of years of hourly weather records.
We know that Europe has never had an hour where there wasn't significant sun or significant wind somewhere on the continent any hour in the past 30+ years. The same can be said for North America, and Asia.
What use is hundreds of hours of weather records when the climate is changing in ways we do not yet understand?
"somewhere" on the continent being windy is useless unless we have the transmission capacity to move that much power across thousands of kilometres. See also what just happened in australia last week - nearly 40% of the country stuck with very low wind speeds for nearly a week. What then?
Go fully renewable. Add batteries, like Google is doing. Just one example: https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2026/02/24/google-to-deploy-worl...
In the meantime in Switzerland:
"Our cheapest electricity product is nuclear electricity."
The prices are all-inclusive.
New nuclear power plants would be much more expensive at $180 / MWh or more, due to strict modern regulations. Even with these regulations, there is no nuclear plant that is safe against a terrorist crashing an airplane into it.
The unsolved permanent repository problem is left to future generations.
Finally, building a new nuclear power plant will easily take a decade or more.
And that price will only get cheaper, as both the US and China continue ramping up production.
Nuclear? It would need to reduce its costs by 70% to get where solar is now. And then do it again to be competitive with where solar+storage will be in 10 years.
Nuclear is economically a dead technology.
Here's how much each energy source contributes to Switzerland's grid: https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/strom/produktion
Right now, solar and other renewables produce enough energy to meet about two thirds of our demand. Solar alone produced around 55GWh of the needed 169GWh yesterday.
Look at new year's day though: consumption was 192GWh (14% higher than yesterday) and yet solar only produced 11.4GWh and that was an unusually good day for winter.
You can't talk about the price of solar, even solar with storage, without talking about the climate it's in. Assuming your prices are for summer or a mild climate like California, you need to multiply those by around 6x to get a system that can replace nuclear for a baseline load in Switzerland.
That brings the price to $180-$510/MWh.
FWIW: I live in Switzerland and have solar panels and a battery on my house. I sell the obscene amount of excess solar I generate in summer to the grid which covers much of the cost I incur buying from the grid in winter. That power is generated by nuclear.
Sizewell C, its £38bn current price tag is looking very very shaky - £60bn final cost wouldn't surprise me. And our electricity bills are going up again in order to help fund it. Lovely