How they actually actually do.
Last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission just approved a new construction of a reactor for the first time in 10 years, to the Bill Gates backed Terra Power. Cool, except it’s projected to cost $4 billion and the government is expected to cover half the cost, to build a reactor with 345 MW of capacity.
In contrast, solar panels cost about $1 million per MW, so an equivalent amount of peak capacity from solar would cost about $345 million, or about 1/12 the price. Solar won’t run all day, but the nuclear plants will also continue to cost money to run after construction is complete.
Looking at the different LCOE estimates of each type of power generation shows that advanced nuclear is around $80/MWhr and solar+battery for all day demand tracking is about $53/MWhr.
Basically nuclear is only economically viable with government support at this point, and we should be asking whether we’d rather have the government support towards other forms of energy.
Yeah, unfortunately, nuclear power should have been heavily invested in about… 50 years ago. The “The best time was yesterday, the second-best time is now” line doesn’t apply with advancements in other energy sources and the sheer time it takes to build and get a nuclear plant operational. The best time was yesterday - now is perhaps the worst time.
Still, it is always good to push back on anti-nuclear sentiment. Every nuclear plant kept running is a massive amount of fossil fuels removed from power generation. I remember when Merkel closed a ton of nuclear plants in Germany for dogshit PR reasons, handing power back to fossil fuel suppliers.
Also there’s a specific type of reactor that is optimal because it allows for more easily recycling the spent fuel to use it again, and unfortunately these have not been built as much as the other type of reactor.
It’s because fuel is such an insignificant percentage of the overall cost of building, operating, and maintaining nuclear power. Increasing the complexity of the reactor in order to make the fuel use more efficient is basically a nonstarter, economically.
The 4b are The estimations for now. As far as i know, every single new nuclear plant that we tried to built in the last years overshot its budget by quite a significant amount.
Oh, I agree.
I was a big, big nuclear proponent 20 years ago. But seeing how Vogtle and VC Summer played out, and how that “cheaper” and more “scalable” AP1000 design put Westinghouse into bankruptcy, basically turned me off from the economics of nuclear power.
Oh, and because of how utility generation is paid for, ratepayers in Georgia will be paying for the Vogtle construction and cost overruns in their electric bills for the next 75 years, as the nuclear plant is shielded from competition by price regulators (state Public Utilities Commissions and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission), so even if newer and better technology comes online, customers in 2080 will still be paying for 2020 technology.
The technology is still neat but I don’t believe there’s an economic future for civilian nuclear power generation. Not anymore.
Also how long until a Trump (or future) administration cuts those pesky nuclear regulations.
Humans are the ultimate risk with nuclear an humans fucking suck.
What is the bottom bar on that graph? And how it contributes to the overall cost?
Which graph? I linked to a PDF with a ton of graphs.
The one you’re quoting under the link
Are you talking about battery storage itself being about $126/MWhr? Yeah, that incorporated into the solar+battery LCOE, because solar itself is $31, battery is $126, and the weighted average of how much energy is expected to come directly out of the solar panels onto the grid (at $31) and how much is expected to be stored for later ($31 plus $126) averages out to $53, presumably because most demand matches the daytime solar curve and doesn’t need to be stored for later.
Does “how they actually do” include whitewashing the energy industry with Fox News?
Nuclear is the lesser evil. But I think we should be clear that nuclear can Have a catastrophic effect on the environment if manged incorrectly. Like render entire swaths of earth inhabitable. Like beyond high temperature. Places that mean immediate silent death
But properly managed nuclear is like the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity.
But I will say in light of recent… Events, my faith that humanity could properly manage our waste if nuclear were to become more prolific has wained dramatically.
Immediate silent death is grossly over exaggerating. Even in Chernobyl which was absolute worst case scenario that can’t happen with modern designs, the “immediate death” area was directly around the plant.
The concern is cancer in 30 years, not immediate death. Not that trying to downplay cancer, but it really only makes it uninhabitable for humans who live much longer than 30 years. A lot of wildlife basically doesn’t notice since their lives are shorter. It doesn’t mean we should be cavalier about irradiating the environment, but there is no need to go around calling it immediate death.
Keep in mind significant effort was put into ensure Chernobyl didn’t experience further thermal detonation. It could get a lot worse. Especially with bigger reactors.
All being said there are safer reactor types but do you really trust the same people who put doge in charge with getting that implemented correctly so it doesn’t explode? Especially with the increased interest in small scale reactors that would be much closer to people.
Nuclear energy is not economic. Only military and bribery purposes by lying it is economic. Incumbent energy advocates for nuclear competition because completion can be dragged out to 15+ years, and its energy will forever be undercuttable on price.
The US has absurd 100% tariffs on energy, but even with those, Chinese solar imports are cheapest energy option in the US.
I have solar panels and my backup power company runs three hydroelectric dams in the area, which have replaced the nuclear power station.
How much do they pay you to spout bullshit?
“Fuck you, got mine”
Hey! That’s my town.
For anyone curious, We have a nuclear plant that uses cooling canals in the coastline instead of cooling towers, here’s what they look like.
The temperature change and marshy environment in Florida creates the perfect condition for Crocs (Not gators, those live inland in the everglades)
I guess that’s a positive spin on heat waste, I’m sure there are a lot of negative consequences from hot waste water going into streams…
Not like nuclear is the only thing that does this though, this is a problem with data centers too.
“FOR THE LAST TIME KEVIN, THE COOLING TOWERS ARE RELEASING STEAM. THEY ARE NOT ‘BURNING’ URANIUM”
Just because Coal is waaayyyy worse, it doesn’t mean that nuclear scores are a joke to deal with.
But sure, Coal is WAAAAAAAAY WORSE.
Start building the next nuclear plant now and by the time it’s finished, solar will be king and most economical and safest with no worries about what might happen
Nuclear is the lesser evil. Even my former boss who is an environmental scientist agree we should still maintain nuclear power plants, but only as stop gap before renewable energy becomes more ubiquitous.
The recent surge in oil and gas prices has indeed sparked a “told-you-so” moment for nuclear energy advocates. As of March 2026, geopolitical instability in the Middle East—specifically involving the closure of the Strait of Hormuz—has driven Brent crude to peaks near $120 per barrel, exposing the inherent volatility of fossil fuel dependence.
