“China is proving that nuclear power in the West is way more expensive than it needs to be. While the US and France have seen costs climb for decades thanks to overregulation, bespoke reactor designs, and fragmented supply chains, China has kept costs low by doing the opposite,” reports The Doomslayer.
Nature explains:
Once again, the world is betting on nuclear power. The United States aims to quadruple its nuclear capacity by 2050, and more than 30 countries have pledged to triple global capacity by mid-century. China has more than 30 reactors under construction and in planning, and France has announced plans to build 14 reactors. Technology giants, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, are also investing in nuclear to power their energy-hungry data centers and lower their carbon emissions.
A central challenge remains: can development be done at a manageable cost? Historically, the industry has faced a ‘cost escalation curse. Building more nuclear reactors has led to higher, not lower, costs per watt, hampering their economic viability….
Over the past two decades, China has been the main country to substantially and consistently expand its nuclear fleet, to 58 operating reactors in 2024. Since 2022, the government has been approving around ten new reactors each year, putting China on track to surpass the United States and become the world’s largest holder of nuclear power capacity by 2030…
[Although in other countries] construction costs increased substantially between the 1960s and 2000s, by around tenfold in the United States and by nearly twofold in France, they had halved in China by the early 2000s and have remained largely stable since…
Various strategies were used to keep technological costs down, such as building larger plants for scale efficiency and leveraging accumulated experience…The country has also managed to contain costs through strategic development of domestic supply chains, stable regulatory frameworks, state-backed incentive policies and effective construction management.
In the United States, a startup has begun work on a fusion power plant to supply energy to Microsoft.
MIT scientists also plan to build a fusion power plant in Virginia. They hope to sell the energy produced to Virginia’s largest utility, Dominion Energy.
“Nuclear power is the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University’s Steven Novella. “Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants,” notes an environmentalist. And “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”
Nuclear plants emit no air pollution, only harmless steam. Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. The biggest utility that generates wind power pleaded guilty to federal crimes for killing 150 eagles.
Many years ago, France and Sweden replaced most of their fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power, and as a result, ended up emitting less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour.
