this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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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.
Frankly, this is why I'm still antinuclear; everyone is always, "It's so easy to store!" but, like, that's a reliance in a world that loves cutting corners (usually because of corporate pressure…).
I'd rather invest in the energy source that doesn't have devastating consequences if we don't do it right or someone decides to drill into it despite all the warnings we put up.
Im pretty sure i read that already happened
What is the bottom bar on that graph?
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.