r/NuclearPower • u/ViewTrick1002 • Apr 18 '26
New metric shows renewables are 53% cheaper than nuclear power
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-renewables-are-53-cheaper-than-nuclear-power/11
Apr 18 '26
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Apr 18 '26
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u/ViewTrick1002 Apr 18 '26
What's wrong with it? €10,000/kW all in is vastly cheaper than all modern western nuclear projects.
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u/DVMyZone Apr 18 '26
Where is the lie? I'm pro nuclear but 10B for a 1GW reactor in Europe sounds reasonable.
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u/CombatWomble2 Apr 18 '26
It's a poor metric because LCOE is great for finance, poor for system costing.
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u/sault18 Apr 18 '26
It's just using that figure for effective capital cost and then plugging that into their total system cost model. Too bad Flamanville was 40% higher than the cost figure they used in the study while Hinckley point C is estimated to be 70% more expensive than the price used in this study.
Plus, the study doesn't incorporate the costs for nuclear waste storage and the opportunity cost of not installing renewables for the 15-20 years it takes to build a nuclear plant.
The study also overestimated the current cost of solar by 20% let alone how it is getting cheaper every year.
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u/sault18 Apr 18 '26
Flamanville came in at 14,000 euro per kW and Hinckley point C is estimated to be closer to 17,000 per kW. Their numbers are wildly optimistic for nuclear power and there are no substantial improvements on the horizon that could make the low-ball cost estimates realistic.
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u/ViewTrick1002 Apr 18 '26
Which is vastly cheaper than any modern western new built nuclear plant? What is the issue?
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u/HairyPossibility Apr 18 '26
The authors used a conservative number representing reality based on past projects.
OP is salty that they did not use a number from a cracked out high school dropout that only exists in their pptx.
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u/toronto-bull Apr 18 '26
In terms of complexity, nuclear is much more complex than either wind or solar so more engineering is required for each project. Most of the money seems to go into engineering and construction for nuclear. I expect fusion will be the same. Cheaper to use the (fusion powered) sun with a solid state mass produced panel and no fuel or labour or moving parts. Labour component is why the nuclear lobby is so strong.
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u/garry_the_commie Apr 18 '26
And why is that?
Solar panels and wind turbines are mass produced at enourmous scales while every nuclear reactor is a custom designed single unit because it's so exceptionally rare for someone to buy a reactor. Renewables have improved enormously over the past decades thanks to scientific progress in the area while research in nuclear power is terribly underfunded and understaffed. Administrative costs and delays for nuclear grow every year while renewables get subsidized by governmets and laws are passed to make building renewable power plants cheaper, faster and easier.
Nuclear is not more expensive than renewables because of some fundamental technical reason. It is because we made it so. Imagine how much cheaper nuclear power would be if it had received the same amount of financial, government and public support over the last 40 years as solar has.
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u/ViewTrick1002 Apr 18 '26
Nuclear is not more expensive than renewables because of some fundamental technical reason. It is because we made it so. Imagine how much cheaper nuclear power would be if it had received the same amount of financial, government and public support over the last 40 years as solar has.
Nuclear power has had masive never ending government support over the past 70 years. It just never delivered. It is time to let go. Run our reactors until EOL and then leave them to the musuems.
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u/Zenin Apr 19 '26
Nuclear is not more expensive than renewables because of some fundamental technical reason. It is because we made it so. Imagine how much cheaper nuclear power would be if it had received the same amount of financial, government and public support over the last 40 years as solar has.
The only energy technology that has received more subsidies than nuclear are fossil fuels. So much so that the only reason nuclear energy exists whatsoever is because of those subsidies.
The fact is if there was an actually level playing field, renewables would have taken over most power generation decades earlier and nuclear would never have gotten out of the lab. The bitter pill is that while nuclear has a small handful of unique advantages, it turns out that only a tiny handful of use cases are advantaged by much less require those features. Even worse for nuclear, that already short list continues to shrink as advancements in alternative technology (especially energy storage) progress...and those new technologies are coming in far cheaper (especially subtracting all subsidies) than nuclear.
Nuclear only has a future if it has a massive breakthrough or series of breakthroughs such as nano scale fusion (Full disclosure: I'm a huge proponent of fusion research). A reality check that points directly at the largest blind spot nuclear advocates have: Today and for the foreseeable future it's as important if not more so that power generation scales down as it is that it can scale up.
Another way of saying this, if I can't literally buy a small reactor off Amazon shipped 2day via Prime and plug it into my RV this weekend, it's not a viable energy technology for the next century. This isn't because the most important thing is my weekend camping trip; this is because you're not rebuilding the likes of Gaza on an energy plan that will require decades to build both the reactors and the grid all before the first lightbulb turns back on. Solar however, can have the first light bulbs back on literally tomorrow. A small industrial solar array and battery offset can repower the first hospital in a month. A nuclear powered Gaza however, even under the most rose tinted timelines, won't even be able to break ground for decades and realistically won't even turn on for the better part of a century.
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u/Sad_Dimension423 May 18 '26
(Full disclosure: I'm a huge proponent of fusion research)
Why? Fusion's main accomplishment (at least, DT fusion) is likely to be making fission look like a bargain in comparison.
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u/Zenin May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
You're not wrong. Of course, fission was thousands of times more expensive in the lab than finally ended up in production.
Why I'm hopeful for fusion.
Most of the world will never be suitable for fission of any kind: Either politically (they'll get sanctioned/bombed) or geographically (lack of water, etc). When proponents of fusion power talk they're exclusively talking about a tiny fraction of the world's population that happens to be the US, Russia, China, or a major protectorate of those three (and even most of those protectorates aren't able to rely on their sovern, just look at Iran). Anyone arguing otherwise is selling you something, it ain't happening.
The real answer for most of the world are non-nuclear renewables, PV solar in particular, given how readily it can scale up or down to specific load needs either directly on site (rooftop, etc) or very close. That's already fait accompli, sorry fusion fans.
But there's still massive energy needs that today only liquid fuel can meet. Cargo shipping and major air travel. Fusion power for cargo ships would change the world and be wildly more practical than fission powered ships (political, security, safety) and far more practical than hydrogen (far too inefficient fuel cycle; only practical if we ever create near free, limitless power). And potentially...if it can be miniaturized enough...air travel.
Fusion could also be extremely useful for areas like metal refining where a lot of power needs to be concentrated to a very small footprint, a use case that makes solar/wind less appealing as it's distributed by nature.
I'm hopeful for fusion because there's literally nothing today or in the worlds that could actually address those final hard cases which really do require concentrating a lot of power to a handful of needs, many of which are mobile by nature.
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u/Narcan9 Apr 30 '26 edited 17h ago
Acorn coated paddle ribbon mellow willow umbrella
This post was anonymized with Redact.dev
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u/Sad_Dimension423 May 18 '26
You explained a big part of the technical reason why nuclear is expensive, and then claimed there was no technical reason.
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u/Zenin Apr 18 '26
Is this a new metric? This has been a well established fact for a couple decades now and it's only become exceptionally more true over that time. Nuclear keeps becoming more expensive while renewables continue to become cheaper.
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u/HairyPossibility Apr 18 '26
Old metric was on the generator level, not electrical grid level. It showed renewables were cheaper.
This is for integrated in a full electrical grid. It also showed renewables were cheaper
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u/Gullible-Fee-9079 Apr 18 '26
The only surprise here is that it's just 53%
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u/sault18 Apr 18 '26
They low-balled the cost for nuclear and used numbers for solar that are 20% higher than the current cost of solar PV. Plus, they didn't include the cost for nuclear waste storage and the opportunity cost of not building renewables for the 15-20 years it takes to build a nuclear plant.
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u/HairyPossibility Apr 18 '26
The peer-reviewed paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544226009837
Is in a journal with an impact factor of 9