Total construction of wind, solar, energy storage, and nuclear globally over the past decade is what the market is saying and it’s saying it very clearly.
Individual participants making different bets is how the market decides what’s effective and what’s wasteful. But you can’t assume any subgroup is speaking for the total market, because they could be about to lose big. Nuclear could make a huge comeback in the coming decades, but until that happens we can only talk about the market in terms of what the market is actually doing.
Regulations aren’t what’s driving nuclear to unprofitably. China which still builds nuclear and doesn’t give a fuck about US nuclear regulations is still brining solar and wind to market vastly faster.
It's because nuclear power plants are so durable, they last almost forever, but at least 80-100 years for modern plants.
If you build out too quickly, you end up in the same situation the French found themselves in after the Messmer-plan predictions turned out to vastly overestimate demand: they were done after 15 years.
With effectively no nuclear power plants to build for 45-85 years, their industry withered and they have had to re-learn building them. Not helped by the fact that there was a legal cap on the total amount of nuclear production.
Fucashma happened in 2011, their up over 4x since then with the total share of electricity from nuclear in China roughly doubled. It’s just nowhere close to the changes seen in renewable generation.
China is already trying to use coal as a peaking generation something it’s terrible at. That’s something nuclear is even worse at and what’s ultimately limiting their nuclear ambitions. They slowed down the pass of nuclear construction despite nuclear only making up ~5% of their electricity supply it’s simply an issue with nuclear not regulations.
They reduced nr of builds after fk and ramped up only recently with 10+ reactors approved/yr. But agree it's still harder to scale than renewables, but they are gradually getting close to 4-5 years of build time for their designs so things may improve greatly in near time
I suspect the timing is simply coincidence. Solar became vastly more viable in that timeline and it can be rolled out from planning to electricity in months not years.
China could build nuclear faster if they wanted to. They were building it faster in the 2010s and have slowed down, so they obviously have the capacity.
yes they slowed down and ramping up again now. 10+ reactors/yr approved, 30+ under construction, hualong build time of about 5 years, will probably drop to 4
Individual participants making different bets is how the market decides what’s effective and what’s wasteful. But you can’t assume any subgroup is speaking for the total market, because they could be about to lose big. Nuclear could make a huge comeback in the coming decades, but until that happens we can only talk about the market in terms of what the market is actually doing.