It's probably both. That doesn't mean it isn't true. And a little to counter the mostly pro nuclear articles on HN doesn't hurt. Basically, there's no such thi

It's probably both. That doesn't mean it isn't true. And a little to counter the mostly pro nuclear articles on HN doesn't hurt. Basically, there's no such thing as a profitable nuclear plant. Every nuclear plant in existence exists only because of vast amounts of public funding. People make lots of money with them but that's always courtesy of local tax payers and clever businesses making sure they are not on the spot when things get expensive. When the price per mwh for renewables is an order of magnitude lower (or multiple orders long term), it becomes feasible to do really inefficient things with renewables and still be more cost effective. Things like simply installing 10x more than you need. Or using that excess capacity to generate e.g. hydrogen. Or just spending a lot of money on energy storage. Or building cables so power can be imported/exported between areas with surpluses and shortages. That's why Europe doesn't have rolling blackouts. It has a lot of wind and solar. Some countries have months where they use nothing else. And then winter comes and the lights stay on and no blackouts happen. There are challenges, sure. But they are addressable. What's going on in the market is that legacy power generation is being dismantled more or less prioritized by cost. That's why many formerly coal dependent countries at this point are pretty far done getting rid of coal. Even some parts of the US with traditionally very strong coal lobbies. It just stopped being economical years ago. And that stopped being in doubts soon after. Gas is going to follow the same path now that gas is no longer cheap. Even just the wild price fluctuations of gas are problematic. You can't plan a business to stay financially healthy if the prices of your main resource fluctuate all over the place. Nuclear has been in decline for decades. Old nuclear plants are exploited until the investments for keeping them going fall out of favor with local legislators. New nuclear plants are deeply unpopular and a relatively rare event at this point. Closing existing plants is likewise unpopular because of a sunk cost fallacy that makes it tempting to spend some more. But even that runs out at some point. New plants occasionally get build of course; but rarely on budget or time and usually with vast amounts of public funding. Decommissioning nuclear actually requires investments as well. It's expensive and typically not actually factored into electricity pricing. Just like storing the waste for millennia isn't accounted for either. Or providing perpetual security to prevent terrorists doing things like building dirty bombs with stolen radioactive waste or simply sabotaging a plant. All that depends on public funding. Nuclear plants are stupendously expensive if you consider all of that. The corruption pointed at in the article is basically about how public money has been used for decades to keep expensive nuclear plants going. Big spending infrastructure attracts all sorts of behavior. And where there is big government spending and not a whole lot of scrutiny, corruption is going to happen.