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US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage wh

• vablings 9mo ago
  Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation. It is important for base load power and overnight power and should always be the backing of the grid frequency. Total loss of grid frequency is much more difficult to recover from with synthetic inertia. A healthy grid should have all of the following - Nuclear base load that keeps the grid stable and pick up from low solar - Gas plants for surge power and base load when nuclear/solar/wind cannot take up the slack - Battery storage for surge/storage during off peak - Solar for very low-cost cheap energy during peak usage hours - Wind for other power source ie when the sun isnt shining as much source: https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/
  • bayindirh 9mo ago
    > overregulation. Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse). Some things needs to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet. So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated.
    • ToucanLoucan 9mo ago
      > Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper Americans have no broad idea how anything works. Decades of attacks on our education system have left us civically illiterate (and for a lot of people, actually illiterate too.).
      • stuffn 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        • gregbot 9mo ago
          People who attack the “public education system” as an argument pretty universally agree with every destructive neoliberal policy the American government pushes on the West.
    • vablings 9mo ago
      > We have seen what Boeing has become when it's effectively unregulated. I think this is vastly overstated by the media. Boeing is still heavily regulated and has a pretty good safety record compared 20 or 30 years prior. The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers > Some things need to be regulated, esp. if mistakes are costly to the planet and/or people on the said planet. I absolutely agree. I am not for the removing ALL regulations from nuclear energy but there is a whole political servitude cycle that has taken place for a number of years to make nuclear "safer" when in actuality it has little to no influence on the technology and just adds burden and overhead especially in the new construction of a nuclear power plant Nuclear is this big scary monster because its invisible death machine. Despite us being regularly exposed various levels of radiation in our lives most people are completely unaware of. Some people are terrified of dental x-rays but will happily jump on an intercontinental flight without any second guess. I think arguing in the opposite of "you can never be too safe" is kind of like the whole double your bet every time you lose at the casino yes, its technically true but you need an infinite pool of chips for it to work.
      • piva00 9mo ago
        > The biggest disaster of recent times (MCAS) was because of the tight regulations around type certification and trying to avoid costs to carriers Meaning they tried to skirt around the regulations, including regulatory capture by pushing self-certification because competition caught up to them while they spent money on buybacks instead of investing in R&D, perhaps even investing in absorbing some costs of certification of pilots into a new type they could develop into the future instead of relying on a design from 60 years ago. Mismanagement is what created Boeing's issues, not regulation.
        • mlinhares 9mo ago
          Its also bullshit to say the EU has less regulation on developing planes than the US. Boing was just incompetent and mismanaged because of decades of government handouts keeping the business going and MBA wielding idiots cutting costs at every corner. It became a private equity managed business without ever being bought by private equity.
    • ericmay 9mo ago
      There is room between under-regulation and over-regulation. Given that we are experiencing high costs and other barriers to construction, we can do at least two things: reduce red tape where it makes sense or where the risk is acceptable to help lower costs, or the US government can, through a variety of mechanisms ranging from basic research funding to direct subsidies, spend taxpayer money to try and alleviate costs. Given that we supposedly (and I agree) need to build nuclear reactors to help power our country and given that we aren’t building them, we can optionally use both levers to encourage construction. There seems to be this mind virus that has infected many people on the internet that seem to think that regulations are a moral good, and so having more of them must be more good. This is not accurate. Regulations are simply a tool we can wield to achieve desired outcomes within various risk and need-based calculations. More regulations can be good, for example we should ban highway billboards- that would be a good regulation. Or we can eliminate regulations - allow businesses to build more housing using pre-approved designs that meet existing zoning code. Neither is good or bad, except in that it helps to achieve some aim that society has. The regulation or lack there of, of nuclear energy in the United States has absolutely nothing to do with Boeing airlines screwing up some plane designs. Drawing a conclusion that nuclear energy must be regulated (it is) or over-regulated (it probably is or else we would build more), because of a belief that Boeing airliners weren’t regulated enough is, to put it lightly, nonsense, and you are mistakenly using the application of some regulation or lack of causing some bad things to happen, to imply that more regulation in another area would mean good things happen through this framework of regulation == good. And further, if you’re going to suggest that Boeing is effectively unregulated, which is untrue in practice and in principal, then I’d argue that was for the best given that it is a hugely successful company that employs tens of thousands of people and hundreds of millions have flown and continue to fly on their airlines every single day safely and without incident.
      • Forgeties79 9mo ago
        With something as serious as a nuclear reactor, I am OK with over regulation.
        • dzhiurgis 9mo ago
    • stuffn 9mo ago
      Regulation, I’d argue, is a far more efficient route to monopoly than “unchecked capitalism”. If you have enough money you can gain regulatory capture. If you pay close attention the majority of “evil capitalists” the far left bitches and whines about so much are masters at this. Last mile service, car manufactures, medicine, law, construction, power, water, technology, banking, housing, etc. Most of the world’s billionaires got their money through fucking over the average person with regulatory capture. This must present the leftist with a conundrum they simple ignore because it doesn’t fit their paradigm. More government leads to more control of wealth by fewer people. This isn’t to say all regulation is bad. However, the line between over-regulating and under-regulating is so thin it’s often better to err on the looser side. Otherwise, in many places, small business is immediately crushed and “late stage capitalism” is the result.
      • root_axis 9mo ago
        Regulatory capture is not an argument against regulation, it's an unavoidable externality that has to be managed.
      • whoknowsidont 9mo ago
        >I’d argue You could, but it's without any basis or evidence.
    • CamperBob2 9mo ago
      So yes, nuclear should be regulated, and even overregulated to keep it safe. Here's what overregulation of nuclear power has done for us over the past several decades: "We can't risk releasing radioactive pollution in an accident, so we'll build coal plants that spew it into the air during normal operation instead."
      • whoknowsidont 9mo ago
        Sounds like the other systems are under regulated.
      • janc_ 9mo ago
        Many countries shut down all their coal plants over a decade ago. Why didn't yours?
        • CamperBob2 9mo ago
          Because Greenpeace and other powerful lobby groups convinced Americans that nuclear power was more dangerous than fossil fuels. I'm not one of those tinfoil hatters who rants about how the anti-nuclear movement was seeded and sponsored by the Soviets... but I will say that if they didn't do that, they overlooked some of the most useful idiots at their disposal.
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
    • psunavy03 9mo ago
      This entire comment is conflating "overregulation" with "no regulation" when these are not at all the same things. Oh, and with an extra seasoning of Murica Bad on the side.
    • mlinhares 9mo ago
      There's also the surprise factor that it just never gets cheaper, the newly formed monopolies quickly take over and push prices up beyond what they were before and milk the cow they were given until all customers are bled dry. People that missed the solar bandwagon during the Biden admin are going to regret dearly not having installed it at the price and interest it was back then, we'll never see that again.
    • hammock 9mo ago
      > Americans love to remove regulation to make things cheaper (and to enable capitalistic monopolies, but that's a different matter), then cry when people die (or worse). Different people
  • sheikhnbake 9mo ago
    I suspect geothermal is going to quickly replace Nuclear as the most viable option for base load stabilization. Tech has come a long way towards letting us access it away from hot zones and it uses a lot of the same infrastructure and expertise that the oil industry has already developed.
  • lawlessone 9mo ago
    >Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation. Would to prefer underregulating it? How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation?
    • vablings 9mo ago
      > Would to prefer underregulating it? No > How would you find the exact amount of correct regulation? Difficult problem. The issue right now is that nobody wants to be seen to remove a regulation from a nuclear. One of the biggest things is that ALARA/LNT needs to go away. It is not useful, and it is not based on good modern science Creating new assessments based on modern research would be good and there is already a ton of evidence around that could be foundational for making real science based changes
    • AlexandrB 9mo ago
      Changes to bring regulation in line with actual risk would be a good start: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdLdNRaPKc
  • Retric 9mo ago
    Nuclear is inherently expensive even with zero regulations you have the full costs of a coal power plant + more expensive lifetime costs for fuel + extra costs associated with nuclear such as more and more highly educated workers. Meanwhile coal is dead because it’s already more expensive than the market is willing to accept. The only hope for nuclear is massive subsidies, deregulation on its own isn’t going to work.
    • jeltz 9mo ago
      How come Sweden as cheap nuclear power? The main reason electricity is kinda expensive in Sweden is because the EU forces is to export our cheap nuclear energy to Denmark and Germany.
      • Retric 9mo ago
        Subsides, the cost to produce electricity and the cost charged for that energy end up very different.
      • ViewTrick1002 9mo ago
        Paid off nuclear plants produce quite cheap electricity. The problem is that it takes 10-15 years of building and then 40 years of paying $180-220/MWh to get a paid off nuclear plant as per modern western construction costs.
        • Retric 9mo ago
          In terms of pure operating costs ignoring everything else it can look good vs other sources that include all costs. However, ‘Paid off nuclear’ in terms of construction costs still needs to worry about decommissioning, and their maintenance costs keep increasing every year. Several power plants have looked at going offline for potentially years and spending billions at around year 40 to get to year ~60 as not being worth the investment. That’s the issue with projecting those long lifespans, the buildings/containment structure/cooling tower may be fine but that doesn’t mean the pipes, pumps, turbines, and control systems etc are still fine.
  • cperciva 9mo ago
    Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation. It's not just a matter of "overregulation". ALARA, aka As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable is an explicit goal of nuclear regulation.
  • sdenton4 9mo ago
    Or maybe it's expensive because it doesn't scale. The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them. And if we /do/ hit economies of scale, uranium availability is likely to become a problem...
    • vablings 9mo ago
      > The per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high, making it hard to get economies of scale in building more of them. I disagree. building big infrastructure projects always scales well. As stated by the project managers at Hinkley Point C (the most expensive nuclear reactor ever) they estimate that build times and cost will be significantly reduced for the second reactor due to the knowledge and expertise baked into the workforce. Frances nuclear revolution during the 1972 oil crisis also shows the same thing with construction cost getting lower the more reactors built. There are other reactor designs that do not use uranium that have been tested and hypothesized.
    • jandrewrogers 9mo ago
      > per-unit cost of nuclear power plants is extremely high Unless you are the US Navy. It probably helps that they churn out dozens of the same few cookie-cutter designs without needing permission from NIMBYs.
      • vablings 9mo ago
        Honestly not a terrible idea. Just have your reactor on a huge barge and if it goes meltdown just drag it out into international waters and let the fish deal with it /s
        • larkost 9mo ago
          An actual meltdown at sea would have the now-molten uranium come in contact with seawater, which would instantly flash to high-pressure steam, throwing the uranium into a cancer-causing cloud that the world has never yet seen. This is absolutely a terrible idea about how to deal with a meltdown.
  • epistasis 9mo ago
    Nuclear is expensive because of the large amount of high-skill labor, including welding, that's required. For less economically advanced countries, that labor is cheap. For more economically advanced countries, that labor becomes more expensive. Regulation is a red-herring being pushed as an excuse, mostly by startups that are desperate to get the next round of funding, because it plays very well to the investor class, but it's not based in reality. I ask about this all the time and even if there are some half-baked critiques of things like ALARA, nobody has a path to actually making the Nth build of a reactor cheaper from changing regulations. Even France, which is known for having far lower construction costs than the US on big projects, and for being very good at building out their nuclear fleet in the past, is at ~$12/W with their newest round of 6 reactors. And that's before they have even started construction: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-estimates-cost-six-new-reactors-maximum-728-bln-euros-2025-12-18/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-estimate... This is roughly the cost of the latest US nuclear reactor at Vogtle, which is viewed as unrealistically expensive energy. And even the most optimistic plans for reducing the cost of nuclear from the Liftoff report in 2023 from DOE doesn't place regulations as having much of a role in lowering costs: https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-Nuclear-Liftoff-Report.pdf https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-... There's significant political interest in having regulation be the reason that nuclear is expensive, but I find almost zero people in the nuclear industry that are able to articulate where regulations increase the cost of builds or whether there's anything that could or should be changed about the regulations.
  • stephen_g 9mo ago
    Grid forming inverters for providing virtual inertia are only going to get better and better, there's no reason that as those control systems improve why synthetic inertia won't be able to be basically identical to real spinning mass. In the meantime while that technology matures, synchronous condensers can provide grid inertia without needing nuclear or coal, we already have about four in Australia supporting our grid and will probably have another dozen or so built over the next decade or two.
  • immibis 9mo ago
    Is there a comparison of how much nuclear costs versus the number of cities destroyed per year? Say, if we allow 1 meltdown per year does it become comparable to solar or does it require 10 meltdowns per year?
    • nandomrumber 9mo ago
      How many cities per year does solar destroy? What?
      • immibis 9mo ago
        Allegedly the reason nuclear is expensive is that it's expensive to prevent Chernobyl. So I'm asking for a curve relating energy costs to Chernobyls per year. I'd like to read off the curve how many Chernobyls per year would be required to make nuclear energy as cheap as solar.
        • nandomrumber 9mo ago
          I see, thanks for clearing that up.
  • wahnfrieden 9mo ago
    nuclear also has a very limited lifespan if we go all-in on it. we will run out.
    • TheTaytay 9mo ago
      Run out of what? The fuel? Given its energy density, and uranium availability, that seems unlikely, but I haven’t done math on it.
  • xp84 9mo ago
    You sound like you know a lot, I’m curious if there’s a case to be made that instead of batteries that take a ton of minerals and need to be replaced, instead using the excess energy to store energy by e.g. pumping water to higher altitudes and letting it generate electricity on the way down later when needed.
  • m0llusk 9mo ago
    Or possibly under regulated. Where exactly is all the radioactive waste going to go? Especially the spent fuel rods pose major disposal challenges. The one site that was looking hopeful appears to have been discarded. It is a bit late in the game to be pending basic stuff that is piling up. Most nuclear power plants are not well sited for long term disposal, though that is what is happening.
• cyberax 9mo ago
  > US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) That's when storage is not considered. Once storage is factored in, the LCOE becomes anywhere between $5 to $20. In the US, solar makes a lot of sense in the southern states, less sense in Midwest and WA. That being said, the US still has plenty of capacity to accommodate more "sewer grade" (no battery backup) solar generation. It will provide easy CO2 savings and it can work well with flexible power consumers (AI training datacenters).
  • toomuchtodo 9mo ago
    This administration won't last long enough to see any of these nuclear ambitions to any sort of success (its takes at least a decade to build nuclear generators in the developed world). Words are cheap, and regime change is coming. Solar and battery storage is already the cheapest form of generation in most of the world, and will only continue to decline in price, while the US will continue to face system and labor challenges precluding the large scale construction of commercial nuclear. The US currently doesn't have enough labor to build residential construction and naval vessels, so it will be interesting to see where they attempt to source this labor from (assuming the usual labor pipeline challenges where it takes up to half a decade to turn a human into a skilled tradesperson from an apprentice or other form of beginner). Citations: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-every-hour-of-every-day-is-here-and-it-changes-everything/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-enough-to-deliver-solar-when-it-is-needed/ https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/batteries-now-cheap-... https://www.agc.org/news/2025/08/28/construction-workforce-shortages-are-leading-cause-project-delays-immigration-enforcement-affects https://www.agc.org/news/2025/08/28/construction-workforce-s... https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/10/hbi-labor-market-report https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/10/hbi-labor-market-report https://www.slashgear.com/2034405/us-navy-warship-building-worker-shortage/ https://www.slashgear.com/2034405/us-navy-warship-building-w...
  • gardncl 9mo ago
    That is not correct, and doesn't even pass the sniff test. Solar is deployed at ~$2/watt and you're saying batteries are increasing that cost 2.5x to 10x? So, someone installing a home battery system is paying up to 10x their solar install cost to also have battery backup? No way. Also, battery tech continues to improve rapidly, we're seeing breakthroughs like this rapidly reduce the price: https://spectrum.ieee.org/co2-battery-energy-storage https://spectrum.ieee.org/co2-battery-energy-storage A good video on LCOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-891blV02c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-891blV02c
• fasterik 9mo ago
  This comment is also misleading. First, $/watt is not how levelized cost of electricity is measured, you need to use $/watt-hour (or more commonly, $/MWh) over the lifetime of the project. By definition, levelized cost of electricity does not include storage. The cost is also affected by the percent of energy coming from wind+solar+batteries vs. from natural gas. Wind+solar+batteries are cheap when they are used to supplement natural gas. If they were supplying 95% of generation (Levelized Full System Cost of Electricity 95%, LFSCOE-95), then the price of wind+solar+batteries would be $97/MWh compared to $37/MWh for gas, and $96/MWh for nuclear. For LFSCOE-100, the price of wind+solar+batteries increases to $225/MWh, compared to $122/MWh for nuclear and $40/MWh for natural gas. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Bank_of_America_(2023) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... So yes, natural gas is much cheaper than nuclear. But that doesn't mean that nuclear shouldn't play a large role going forward. The moral of the story is that the price of energy is complicated. It's likely that a combination of nuclear, wind, solar, and battery backup would be the best option in terms of price and carbon emissions.
  • gardncl 9mo ago
    My comment is not misleading, you're just using outdated data from 2022. Sure, happy to quibble over units. The most recent mid-2025 data is from lazard here, it echos exactly what I'm saying. Website: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-energyplus-lcoeplus/ https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e... PDF of report: https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025-_vf.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-... Go to page 8 of that PDF and you will see these ranges for LCOE: * Solar $38-$78/MWh * Solar + battery $50-131/MWh * Gas combined cycle (cheapest fossil fuel) $48-107/MWh Yes, we are finally at price parity for the technologies.
    • fasterik 9mo ago
      I didn't disagree that there is price parity for the levelized cost. There is still not price parity for levelized full system cost. If we used wind and solar for 95-100% of generation, the price would be much higher. My point is not that we can or should replace wind and solar with nuclear. It's that it is far cheaper to use a combination of nuclear, wind, and solar than it is to use 100% wind and solar.
• salynchnew 9mo ago
  > Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly. People still insist that ecofascists(?) or NIMBYism is what killed nuclear, when the reality is that it was the coal industry.
  • hunterpayne 9mo ago
    There is sort of some truth to that but its still pretty disingenuous to phase it that way. The more honest way to say it is that the NIMBYists are (probably somewhat unintentionally) keeping FFs in use by opposing nuclear. Also, you (and everyone else in the thread) are listing capacity costs. Nobody cares about capacity costs except the CFO of a utility. Utilization costs are what matters. And by that (honest) metric, nuclear is quite cheap if you exclude the extra costs due to scientifically illiterate eco-activists and regulators. People like to say that "A diamond is forever" is the best marketing effort of all time. I disagree, the ability of FF extractors to get ecos to do their dirty work for them is far more "impressive" (from a POV lacking in ethics). PS The number of outright falsehoods in just this thread about nuclear should prove my point. Just research about how nuclear pays for cleanup and compare that to some comments in this thread for an example.
• ViewTrick1002 9mo ago
  South Korea which famously had an enormous corruption scandal coupled to their nuclear industry. Leading to jail time and a complete regulatory retake. 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... The proposed costs for the Westinghouse reactors in Poland and EPR2s in France are pretty much in line with the unthinkably expensive Vogtle costs. They haven’t even started building.
  • hunterpayne 9mo ago
    "They haven’t even started building." Both Vogtle units (3 & 4) have been online for over a year.