I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.
The problem is that LCOE is an imperfect metrics that does not take into account storage properly for grid with high percentage of renewables (that requires significantly more battery storage than current 4h window considered in LCOE). LCOE also does not account completely for time effects associated with matching electricity production to demand. There is no clear metric for this, given that the cost depends on the structure of the grid itself and is specific for each country, but the Wikipedia article you posted show in the graph a very incorrect picture. Renewable (solar and wind) + storage is in the $80–150/MWh range, while nuclear is $130–200+/MWh range. It is worth noticing that nuclear cost is very high in Europe and US but can be actually very cheap (reason why china, the world leader on renewable is also world leader on new power plants). Estimation for new Chinese nuclear is at $62/MWh (https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/REupdate/20240927.php)
All measures are imperfect, that doesn’t mean it’s totally meaningless and should be disregarded. And it also seems like you’re referencing outdated data, as the cost of battery storage seriously decreased in 2025. But by any measure i can find, nuclear is significantly more expensive than renewables+storage. Regarding China, their data is generally not trustworthy on any topic, but yes I’m sure nuclear can cost a lot less there than elsewhere when you can steamroll over the citizens that would be effected by a powerplant’s construction, operation, and waste storage.
I’m not an expert in this at all, but I believe that private capital isn’t investing their own money in new nuclear construction, and that tells the whole story about the cost per watt of nuclear. If nuclear was cheaper per watt after all costs were considered then private capital would be building new nuclear, but they aren’t, so that means it clearly isn’t.
EDIT
I just looked at your link and it pretty clearly says the opposite of everything you said. Quote from the intro of your article:
And
I have never disputed that in general solar+storage is cheaper, I am disputing the data in that Wikipedia article that make it looks like it is 20 times cheaper. It is not that much cheaper, and china build lot of nuclear because grid diversification is more valuable then just making it cheaper. Production cost and energy price are independent variables and nuclear bring energy price down as it stabilizes the grid.
Storage cost is going down, but storage demand by energy produced is going up as you need much more storage then just peak hour demand as you are shutting down load following power plant generator like coal, nuclear and gas.
The link I shared is to provide the reference to $62/MWh stated above.