Comment by jmyeet

China is the only country on Earth that I would trust to build, manage and maintain nuclear power plants.

The point you're touching on is that nuclear power is expensive, so much so that not a single nuclear power plant has been built in the world without significant government subsidies. And even then the LCOE cost is basically the highest amongst all electricity sources. And it only gets that "low" by them pushing out the lifetime of the power plant, at least on paper, to 60 years.

As an example, Hinkley Point-C ("HPC") has that 60 year lifespan, a cost that has doubled since it was approved and a contracted electricity cost that is among the highest in Europe but I believe that contracted price only lasts 35 years. So what happens then? Likely because of increased costs of plant maintenance the costs are going to go way up.

But back to China. China is building over 30 nuclear reactors currently. It has largely standardized on two designs (rather than a unique design for each site). It owns the supply chain and the IP. And each project is getting cheap credit from the state (under 2%). All of this is going to make the end result far more cost competitive.

I cannot stress enough how much standardization matters here and China has proved this time and time again, for example with trains (both long-distance and for metros). A time-consuming and expensive part of any large capital project is procurement. Every city in the West that wants to build light rail has to put out RFPs for the rolling stock. That process is time-consuming and you get no economy of scale. China basically says "this is what you're using" and it saves years and billions off any project. As an example, there are cities in China that had no metro system 20 years ago that now rank in the 10 largest metro systems in the world by track length, number of stations and ridership.

Any private nuclear power plant in the West is going to try to raise profits by cutting maintenance. We see this with every private utility in the US. Even with oversight by the NRC, the NRC itself is subject to budget cuts.

There are large, unsolved problems with all of this too. Processing the fuel, processing the spent fuel and the transportation and storage of spent fuel are all unsolved problems, despite what the pro-nuclear crowd like to say.