China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.
I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
What if I told you Europeans used to throw people in jail (or worse ) for claiming the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun?
This is a forever problem.
Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233880587_Nuclear_e...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
Many of specific issue around design nuclear weapons based on U-233 are classified. But:
"A declassified 1966 memo from the US nuclear program stated that uranium-233 has been shown to be highly satisfactory as a weapons material, though it was only superior to plutonium in rare circumstances. It was claimed that if the existing weapons were based on uranium-233 instead of plutonium-239, Livermore would not be interested in switching to plutonium.
The co-presence of uranium-232 can complicate the manufacture and use of uranium-233, though the Livermore memo indicates a likelihood that this complication can be worked around."
Thorium-based nuclear research was practically shut down during the Cold War precisely because they realized that you can't make nuclear weaponry out of it. It would have been a very different world otherwise.
1. General decline of nuclear power plant building after 1970s in U.S. Why financing research for Thorium-based reactor, when even PWRs and BWRs are not build anymore. The shutdown of sodium-based reactor research is another example.
2. Handling of highly radioactive corrosive molten salts in Molten-salt reactor designs is a big issue. Materials resistant to both intensive chemical corrosion and neutron irradiation were open research problem.
3. Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
4. Thorium-based reactor could be used to produce weapon usable Uranium-233. But this production was not necessary, as military Plutonium production reactors were already build.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor#Fuel_repro...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I don't think I've ever seen a place fully compliant with all regulations down to the last letter. Somebody inevitably takes a shortcut somewhere. All you can do is push those shortcuts into places they don't matter.
Certainly not the times and culture we live in, but the "test" they tried running at Chornobyl violated their own regulations too…
>>highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
Like, how would that disgruntled office worker even reach that highly radioactive material? Especially without killing themselves in the process. Hospitals already have extremely radioactive cobalt sources on premises, and they are 1) impossible to get to by a normal employee 2) would kill said employee if they ever did get to them somehow.
Also sources tend to come with shielding. Some portable, some less-portable. Oh and.. use machinery / robots / whatever, with operator outside the danger zone.
Your "impossible" does a lot of heavy lifting here.
No, it's the normal that does the heavy lifting. A radiation therapy machine does not allow for an easy removal of the source, not without hours of work with specialized machinery. Again, how does a disgruntled office worker do this without immediate attention of security?
>>There can be a good bit of time between receiving a lethal dose of radiation, and dying (or incapacitated) from that
Well, it's really unfortunate, but we have multiple reports from people who have accidentally walked into a room with an open Cesium source at various irradiation facilities - they all reported that they felt incredibly sick in less than a minute. And that's "just" an irradiation source, not an active nuclear reactor. Again, I'm struggling to imagine how a "disgruntled worker" gets anywhere near the actual radiactive material within it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR_(Chinese_reactor_project)
The difficulty with molten salt reactors is that molten salt is highly corrosive. It will be interesting to see if they are able to make them cost effective.
Yes it's subsidized, everything in China is subsidized, that's the best part of a planned-capitalist economy. But it's actually becoming more market driven so they can reduce financial pressure and force efficiency from competition. In 10 years those subsidies are gonna be a lot smaller
> Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.
> Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Global-report-confirms-an...
The statement about subsidies is false too for existing plants. IPEX data is public. There are more subsidies for new units because the west is bad at construction but the amount is still not that great. Heck, biomass in EU gets 2x the CFD's vs min profitability limit of french Flamanville...
China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
isn't this proven to be true? better for the country, worse for a small amount of directly affected people?
But then China expanded outside of cheap low-value-add goods and started to get into higher-value-add goods, and started directly competing with our industries in those spaces. They could source stuff cheaper and put major chunks of industry out of business. Now the US is a service economy, has major problems with cranking out large quantities of high-quality goods, and the Chinese are starting to look at Taiwan with even more malicious intent.
Now Europe seems to want to sign up for the same package, because of supposed American political and diplomatic instability, even though the instability is the US government acting at home more and more like the Chinese government does (censorship, thin-skinned leadership, excessive exercise of the state's monopoly on violence, etc.).
Nothing to be done about it. The continent will have to learn the hard way, as we did.
Or Mercedes, where they decided to build extremely expensive EVs that departed from their core design so much their core audience didn't want to buy them, then they were surprised EVs don't sell.
Or Audi who were probably a masterclass in offering the worst possible value for money you could imagine with their EVs - £50k Q4 that still had manual seats, like what are you competing with exactly?
Only Skoda could really kinda buck the trend with the Enyaq, which proves that VW could be competive if they wanted to, but they actively decided not to.
And don't start me on the Peugeot/Renault/Opel cars, which initially looked incredibly interesting and actually competitive, but I can only guess that Stellantis told them to tone it down because again - have to protect their core business of ICE cars, can't be too good.
And then MG came in with very well specced working EVs, and then other Chinese brands moved in, and big european manufacturers are crying that they are eating their lunch. Like, you guys had literally years to address this, but you decided to protect your legacy product over investing in the future = you're reaping the results now.
Building out a new production line for vehicles is insanely expensive. Billions upon billions of dollars. You need the old cars to sell well enough to pay for this and all of your other expenses.
China got to get into the EV space with a mostly-clean slate. Their domestic manufacturers made absolutely horrid products at the turn of the century. They did what they do best: copy successful people with investment from the successful people.
They only let Western manufacturers sell in China with the cooperation of a local vehicle manufacturer. That necessitated a bunch of investment and IP transfers to Chinese manufacturers who didn't have to shell out themselves, and when they did, it was with the complete backing of the state.
When EV technology really became something viable in the last 10-15 years, they just used that capacity, lower wages, and lax environmental regulations around mining, to undercut the rest of the world on EVs.
It's easy to act like the rest of the world just isn't competent enough, but there are layers to this.
In practice though Westinghouse still bids lowest out of the politically viable options these days. Korean and French reactors are rather expensive.
Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.
The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think.
Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...
In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels.
You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.
fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly.
Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess.
We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in.
Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base.
> Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind
15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like).
And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
> And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
That doesn't solve your problems in the slightest. You get less than half the return on investment for PV that most other countries in the world get, and does nothing for when your peak energy load is. Every dollar spent on PV requires another dollar on natural gas for the winter and locks you into fossil fuel dependency. Spend the money on something which gives you winter power!
> the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns.
That's exactly what I mean. Where can you actually build it? And is that enough? And why spend a dime on solar until you've maximized wind?
> If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it?
See, exactly, that's the kind of national conversation you (and here in the USA) should be having. But we don't do that kind of thing any more. The politicians make money lying about the costs of things -- Gerhard Schröder being, I guess, a Russian stooge at best, a great example of downplaying the full costs.
Domestic heating has little to do with industrial base. Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.
It does because 1. they're both fighting for now-expensive imported natural gas 2. rates go up for everybody to pay for the malinvestment in solar
> Fertilizer prices would still have risen. Grain supplies would still be affected.
I meant "for Germany". Those are a problem for others.
Maybe this is already complete, but at one point of lot of it was from decommissioning nuclear weapons, so it wasn't "we need them for fuel", it was "lets make use of this waste material and provide a financial disincentive for nuclear proliferation".
Finally, the West has plenty of sources for Uranium, and given plants already have years of fuel onsite, it is never a pressing problem.
They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind.
Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun.
> In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000.
Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
2.000 hours of storage would equate to 83 full days of electricity demand. That's on its face absurd. Most models assume that a "Dunkelflaute" (span of time with significantly reduced solar and wind output) will last at most 10 days. Add a few days as a safety margin. And that is all of Europe becalmed and dark, as the entire European electricity net is synchronized and transfer capacity between various regional grids is continuously expanded.
Power transmission is a thing. And where you can't lay down a transmission line, you can convert electricity into h2 or methane and put it on ships, just like we do with dino juice.
The longest recorded in Finland is 90 days. More than two weeks of it continuously happens nearly every winter.
> as the entire European electricity net is synchronized
It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
> Power transmission is a thing.
It is not a thing you can trust. We have only just gotten a very sharp reminder of that. We have a neighbor that likes to cut sea cables as a fun past-time activity.
> you can convert electricity into h2 or methane
I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Not trying to diss Finnland, but the country requires less than 1,000,000 Terrajoulehours of energy per year. That's like a few percent of Germany's usage. I'm sure Europe could cover you.
> It is not. The CESA is synchronized. The various peripheral areas are not part of it.
You are correct. But transmission lines do exist and synchronization would be possible. The baltic countries have done so in 2025 to get away from the Russian grid.
>> Power transmission is a thing. > It is not a thing you can trust.
You trust it now. My guess would be that most fossil fuels in Finnland are imported and that the country is already deeply dependent on cross-border electricity transmission (as basically every other country in Europe)?
For most countries, energy independence is no realistic option and never has been since serious expansion of industry. It's something you factor into hardening your infrastructure and Finnland can hedge against this with land-based transmission lines to Sweden and building out capacity for h2/methane imports.
> I am very pro that, but this will take a very long time to build out.
Longer than the presumed 20+ years to build even a single nuclear reactor?
There's no point in synchronizing the Nordics / Britain / Ireland with CESA grids since they are interconnected with HVDC rather than AC.
Virtually nowhere gets zero sun.
Finland is also unusually blessed with tons and tons of hydropower potential which functions both as a battery as well as power generation.
As well as a very low population density.
It is also possibly the best advert for not using nuclear power ever given the disaster of recent projects (e.g. EDF cost overruns).
And at high latitudes, the night can be very long. And even when the sun does appear for a bit, it doesn't provide a lot of energy.
And you might want to ask the Fins how they feel about nuclear power: around two thirds of the population are for it as well as pretty much the entire political establishment, including the Green Party.
Where did you get that idea from? This isn't Norway; we don't have any mountains. The country is mostly flat and most of the suitable locations already have a hydropower plant since the 1970s.
Low sun angle plus very heavy cloud cover means that even midday looks like a gloomy sunset.
Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).
Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly.
The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
"Most significant was the decision to abandon adding an extra wall in the reactor containment building—a feature designed to increase protection against radiation in the event of an accident."
Most reactors currently in operation have a single wall containment building. The EPR has double layer containment, but the new EPR2 reactor will have single-wall prestressed concrete containment structure with a metal liner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR2_des...
Also Korea’s nuclear industry as pretty far from decline:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/khnp-sets-out-pl...
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/sites-selected-f...