6 ms·

China and South Korea can build nuclear reactors cheaply.

pydry 4mo ago
China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base. Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.
- UltraSane 4mo ago
  solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
  - pydry 4mo ago
    This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says. The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think. Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
    - coryrc 4mo ago
      In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generation_germany_2025.pdf https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat... In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels. You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.
      - tfourb 4mo ago
        Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month. fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly. Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess. We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in. Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
        coryrc 4mo ago
        > we paid dearly for that And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base. > Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind 15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
        tfourb 4mo ago
        > Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like). And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns. > And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute? I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it? We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
    - Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
      > solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind. Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun. > In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+. How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000. Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
      - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
        I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
        Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
        Spain and Finland are not part of the same grid. Spain is in the CESA, Finland is in the NSA.
        laurencerowe 4mo ago
        Being part of the same grid doesn't matter so much as the amount of interconnection available. Finland has a higher proportion than Spain since France has stalled on building more interconnection capacity as this will likely reduce the amount they can sell their excess nuclear generation to Germany.
      - 4mo ago
    - UltraSane 4mo ago
      It isn't propaganda. No country gets 100% of its electricity from wind and solar 100% of the time for a reason.
  - spikels 4mo ago
    The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
    - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
      Can you share where those numbers are from? I'd like to run a similar calculation on my own country. Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).
      - laurencerowe 4mo ago
        Solar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage. Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly. The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.
- Danox 4mo ago
  I don’t know if it’s that much cheaper, but they have the well to execute on infrastructure. does Japan for that matter and Taiwan.
jltsiren 4mo ago
One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies. China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.
- lenerdenator 4mo ago
  > China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days. Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
  - onraglanroad 4mo ago
    European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind. People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
    - lenerdenator 4mo ago
      I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it. I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
      - onraglanroad 4mo ago
        That's a fair point. It's a difficult sell to say you have to pay more to help out your fellow citizens, in most countries.
      - willsmith72 4mo ago
        "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" isn't this proven to be true? better for the country, worse for a small amount of directly affected people?
ponector 4mo ago
There is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.
- Moldoteck 4mo ago
  There is. Hualongs and ABWR were/are about 3bn/unit. Local Korean APR is about 4.5bn/unit
  - sehansen 4mo ago
    The four APRs built in Abu Dhabi cost $32 billion in total and the two they've contracted to build in Czechia is projected to cost $18 billion in total.
triceratops 4mo ago
How much per kW?
tfourb 4mo ago
China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".
- Danox 4mo ago
  The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service. I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
  - fc417fc802 4mo ago
    Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.
    - budsniffer952 4mo ago
      You think this is a modern American problem? What if I told you Europeans used to throw people in jail (or worse ) for claiming the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun? This is a forever problem.
    - Recurecur 4mo ago
      Indeed. Good to hear you’re a Trump supporter!
  - crote 4mo ago
    > Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power. Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.
subscribed 4mo ago
Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.
ViewTrick1002 4mo ago
Meaning the solution for cheap nuclear power is cheating a corruption. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...
- leonidasrup 4mo ago
  The article is quite full of the classic nuclear fear mongering. Like: "Most significant was the decision to abandon adding an extra wall in the reactor containment building—a feature designed to increase protection against radiation in the event of an accident." Most reactors currently in operation have a single wall containment building. The EPR has double layer containment, but the new EPR2 reactor will have single-wall prestressed concrete containment structure with a metal liner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR2_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR2_des... Also Korea’s nuclear industry as pretty far from decline: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/khnp-sets-out-plans-for-usd186bn-czech-nuclear-project https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/khnp-sets-out-pl... https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/sites-selected-for-korean-nuclear-new-build https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/sites-selected-f...

pydry 4mo ago

China and South Korea build everything more cheaply because they have a better developed industrial base. Solar and wind is still vastly cheaper for them and still much cheaper when paired with storage.

UltraSane 4mo ago
solar and wind is only cheaper up to a certain percentage of total power due to its unreliability. Every watt of wind and solar is subsidized by another dispatchable source. As a sysadmin it seems very comparable to the need to essentially buy 2x and only run things at 50% capacity.
- pydry 4mo ago
  This is what the oil and nuclear industry propaganda says. The reality is that solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think, demand shifting (e.g. charging the car when it's sunny) is easier than you think, batteries and pumped storage and power2gas are cheaper than you think and nuclear power is way, way, way, way more expensive than you think. Weather based models with actual data say that in Australia you'd need 5 hours of storage to get to ~97% renewable: https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-grid-is-well-within-reach-and-with-little-storage/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g... In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+.
  - coryrc 4mo ago
    In January 2025, solar generated 1.5TWh of electricity in Germany (in June it generated 10TWh): https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generation_germany_2025.pdf https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat... In January 2025, Germany burned about 236 TWh of fossil fuels. You cannot even mostly replace fossil fuels with solar.
    - tfourb 4mo ago
      Germany will need a total of 1,867 TWh per year in 2030, so an average of 155 TWh/month. fossil fuels are very inefficient when used in most applications (especially ICE and oil for heating). As countries use more and more electricity instead of fossil fuels to generate motion and heat, total energy demand will decrease accordingly. Currently, Germany imports almost all of its fossil fuel from abroad. Mainly Norway, USA, Gulf countries, etc. Russia used to play an important role and we paid dearly for that. As we are for the reliance on the US, I guess. We could actually bring our energy dependence closer to home and make it cheaper by substituting fossil fuel imports with solar + battery with the PV part being distributed across northern African countries. But most likely it will be more convenient (if less efficient) and politically desirable to create a mix of domestic and souther European sources, with specialized stuff like H2/Green NG imports from Iceland and other energy rich places being mixed in. Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement not from solar, but from wind. Already, renewable energy has very much softened the effects of the Iran war on electricity prices. They never exceeded the highest levels of 2025, while fossil fuels jumped to levels last seen immediately after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and are still elevated over 2025 levels.
      - coryrc 4mo ago
        > we paid dearly for that And if you had invested in Drake Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community solar setup instead of PV, then neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine nor Hormuz blockade would have been a huge deal. The cost of energy is destroying your industrial base. > Also, Germany will (and does) a large share of it energy requirement ... from wind 15TWh in January 2025. Again, you burned about 230 TWh of fossil fuels. Nearly every heating system is over 80%, electricity closer to 50%, so lets say 150TWh. Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute?
        tfourb 4mo ago
        > Do you have an order of magnitude more land and water you're able to put wind generation on? Actually yes. We currently use less than 0.5% of our agricultural land for PV (and some agricultural use is technically possible below PV). We could of course dedicate 5% or even 10% of land use to PV, if we really needed to (which we don't). We also could still expand PV to large swathes of build-up area (car parks and the like). And Wind turbines actually don't need much space at all, the main issue is distance to settlements because of noise/shadow concerns. > And are you willing to base your life and economy on not having Dunkelflaute? I think there is an interesting discussion to be had. If we could i.e. half the cost of energy but have to live with drastically reducing energy consumption every few years for a couple of weeks in winter, would that be worth it? We actually did so in the first winter after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because energy prices rose dramatically and people and businesses reacted accordingly. That was painful (and had no upside whatsoever), but I think if it didn't come completely by surprise but would be a designed part of the system, it might be worth it.
  - Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
    > solar and wind anticorrelate more than you think They anticorrelate in some locations. In others, they don't. Here in Finland in the winter you get effectively zero sun. We also get persistent stationary anticyclones. That means potentially over a month of temps in the -30°C region, and zero wind. Australia is extremely sunny. California is even better, they are modeling that assuming they keep their current hydro capacity, they only need to add ~3h in batteries. Hot places also do better than cold places, because the usage peaks track the sun. > In Europe or America you might need 7-8 while in carbon industry PR models (the same people who denied global warming) seem to think you need 300+. How on earth do you expect 7-8 to be enough? 300 isn't enough either. The real number for a fully renewable-based grid here is somewhere north of 2000. Renewables are great in some situations. There are places in the world that should go for 100% renewables as quickly as possible. It also makes sense to locate a lot of the high-consuming industry in such places. But before you hawk your solution everywhere, you need to actually study the local conditions, and not try to extrapolate anything from Australia.
    - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
      I think it also depends on other stuff. Spain gets bunch of sun even when there's the deepest winter in Finland but even if they are technically part of the same grid, the challenge is getting the energy there.
      - Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
        Spain and Finland are not part of the same grid. Spain is in the CESA, Finland is in the NSA.
        laurencerowe 4mo ago
        Being part of the same grid doesn't matter so much as the amount of interconnection available. Finland has a higher proportion than Spain since France has stalled on building more interconnection capacity as this will likely reduce the amount they can sell their excess nuclear generation to Germany.
    - 4mo ago
  - UltraSane 4mo ago
    It isn't propaganda. No country gets 100% of its electricity from wind and solar 100% of the time for a reason.
- spikels 4mo ago
  The US uses ~0.5 TW of electricity on average but to go 100% solar you would need ~3 TW of solar capacity (6X average usage) and ~30 TWh of battery storage, maybe lots more, plus a massive upgrade to the grid.
  - pepperoni_pizza 4mo ago
    Can you share where those numbers are from? I'd like to run a similar calculation on my own country. Also I'm curious if you know how geography fits into this (like sunlight hours and stuff).
    - laurencerowe 4mo ago
      Solar and batteries will be extremely expensive if you have no other backup but you could probably get to 80% quite cheaply with solar and around 12h of storage. Geography absolutely matters since seasonal dips in solar generation is basically impossible to fix cost effectively with storage at more northerly latitudes as storage only makes financial sense when you can cycle it daily rather than yearly. The contiguous US is much further south than Northern Europe so it has an easier time of it. But you ideally want wind too since it is anti-correlated with solar.
Danox 4mo ago
I don’t know if it’s that much cheaper, but they have the well to execute on infrastructure. does Japan for that matter and Taiwan.

jltsiren 4mo ago

One of the bids for the third reactor was for KEPCO's APR-1400. Like the other bids, it was too expensive to make sense without subsidies. China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days.

lenerdenator 4mo ago
> China probably fits in the "politically undesirable" category these days. Considering the Europeans are currently hollowing out their industrial base by importing Chinese EVs instead of building their own, I don't see a nuclear reactor being a bridge too far.
- onraglanroad 4mo ago
  European car manufacturers have been given every opportunity and encouragement to build EVs and the phrase "dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century" springs to mind. People are buying BYD because they're better cars, not because they're forced to.
  - lenerdenator 4mo ago
    I mean, it's their industrial base. They can do what they want with it. I can just tell you as a person from the Midwestern US that the whole "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" doesn't work out like they said it would, and that empowering a potential geopolitical rival doesn't really help either.
    - onraglanroad 4mo ago
      That's a fair point. It's a difficult sell to say you have to pay more to help out your fellow citizens, in most countries.
    - willsmith72 4mo ago
      "we'll get lower prices that justify unemploying a bunch of people" isn't this proven to be true? better for the country, worse for a small amount of directly affected people?

ponector 4mo ago

There is no such thing as cheap nuclear reactor. Even cheaper Chernobyl type is expensive to build.

Moldoteck 4mo ago
There is. Hualongs and ABWR were/are about 3bn/unit. Local Korean APR is about 4.5bn/unit
- sehansen 4mo ago
  The four APRs built in Abu Dhabi cost $32 billion in total and the two they've contracted to build in Czechia is projected to cost $18 billion in total.

triceratops 4mo ago

How much per kW?

tfourb 4mo ago

China mostly builds nuclear reactors to retain the required industrial base to maintain a military nuclear program. Nuclear power is heavily subsidized in China, as it is everywhere in the world. It might be cheaper than in the US or Europe, but its not "cheap".

Danox 4mo ago
The Chinese have built a small thorium reactor for research and development, and they went on to build a much larger Thorium reactor which they have refueled on the fly without taking it out of service. I am still surprised that America hasn’t it treated it like a Sputnik moment, but we live in different times than the mid late 1950s. I think we’re waiting for the Chinese to ship it around the world like EV cars. Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power.
- fc417fc802 4mo ago
  Indeed we live in very different times. If a challenger appears whose success threatens certain aspects of one's worldview rather than compete and improve oneself people figured out that it is much lower effort to adopt a partisan mindset and deny reality. Modern American politics in a nutshell.
  - budsniffer952 4mo ago
    You think this is a modern American problem? What if I told you Europeans used to throw people in jail (or worse ) for claiming the earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun? This is a forever problem.
  - Recurecur 4mo ago
    Indeed. Good to hear you’re a Trump supporter!
- crote 4mo ago
  > Imagine a Thorium reactor that can be put into the bowels of a Hospital or an office building basement and supply electrical power. Imagine the terrorism we'll see when highly radioactive material is within reach of any disgruntled office worker.

subscribed 4mo ago

Considering the crazy amount of software and hardware backdoors built-in in buses, inverters, phones, routers, firewalls and mobile carrier devices it would be crazy to allow China to build the critical energy infrastructure.

ViewTrick1002 4mo ago

Meaning the solution for cheap nuclear power is cheating a corruption. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed-and-corruption-blew-up-south-koreas-nuclear-industry/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/04/22/136020/how-greed...

leonidasrup 4mo ago
The article is quite full of the classic nuclear fear mongering. Like: "Most significant was the decision to abandon adding an extra wall in the reactor containment building—a feature designed to increase protection against radiation in the event of an accident." Most reactors currently in operation have a single wall containment building. The EPR has double layer containment, but the new EPR2 reactor will have single-wall prestressed concrete containment structure with a metal liner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR2_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#EPR2_des... Also Korea’s nuclear industry as pretty far from decline: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/khnp-sets-out-plans-for-usd186bn-czech-nuclear-project https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/khnp-sets-out-pl... https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/sites-selected-for-korean-nuclear-new-build https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/sites-selected-f...