That is not the case. Grid modelers always land on renewables being cheaper. Except for the cases when the studies start with "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...

I agree storage is a problem.

But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.

The only way you can make it work is state subsidies and/or forcing people to buy the more expensive nuke power. Which will be unpopular. But maybe you can sell it as a “grid backup fee” or something.

~12 hours storage + overbuilt solar + load shifing seems like it could probably be a complete solution for the vast majority of the world (everywhere that's vaguely close the equator).

There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons. This is a solution that has been proven for billions of years.

We can already capture solar energy at a much better energy efficiency than living beings. Making hydrocarbons with hydrogen extracted from water by electrolysis and concentrated carbon dioxide has acceptable efficiency and already almost one century ago it was possible to do this at a large scale where fossil oil was not available.

The step that has the least efficiency for now is concentrating the dilute carbon dioxide from air, which plants do much better.

There is no doubt that the global efficiency of such a process could have been greatly improved if only a small fraction of the resources allocated to much more frivolous goals had been allocated to this purpose.

While other alternatives are speculative, it is enough to look outside to see plenty of PoCs that this is feasible.

The way China building new reactor is not typical.

Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification.

China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type.

If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.

And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper.

And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.

China can build ten reactors for the cost of Germany running the appeals, environmental studies and neighborhood consultations for one

What happens in days where renewables can't produce enough energy? Or the evenings where we don't have enough batteries (all evenings so far and for the next decade at least)? You can call it base load or whatever you want, but that energy is coming either from hydro, nuclear or a carbon-based source. And those carbons are hard to come by these days, so even if nuclear power is expensive, at least it is reliable.

> Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.

No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y.

Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1]

> The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical.

Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost.

But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one.

In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks.

[1]: https://www.iea.org/countries/china/electricity