u/ViewTrick1002

Shocking data. from Mark Jacobson:

"In April and May, 2026, 89.2% and 85.0%, respectively, of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant's electricity output was wasted since its inability to ramp forced the curtailment of that amount of solar and wind output on the CAISO grid.

For the full year August 1, 2025-July 31, 2026, 29.0% of DC's output was wasted by curtailing solar and wind. This compares with 19.7% the prior year.

For the first 7 months of 2026, 41.7% of all DC's output was wasted, versus 30.2% in '2025

Subsidizing and keeping DC and similar nuclear plants open in the face of overwhelming S+W growth not only wastes huge amounts of much-needed energy but is also clearly responsible for rising electricity prices."

https://x.com/mzjacobson/status/2086503475895291921

by Michaal Barnard...

"That was the deliberately provocative headline I used in 2023. Three years later, the financing structures actually being assembled for new reactors have made the underlying point harder to dismiss.

A gigawatt-scale reactor commits billions for years before it earns operating revenue. Every delay extends the period in which financing costs accumulate inside one enormous asset. Hinkley Point C has demonstrated what carrying that exposure looks like. Britain’s response at Sizewell C wasn’t to find private investors suddenly willing to accept the same construction risk more cheaply. It was to redesign the financial structure so government, regulated customers and public backstops carry substantially more of it.

Private companies can manufacture reactors, build them, operate them and invest in nuclear businesses. Capitalist economies can certainly have nuclear power. But new nuclear remains a poor fit for hands-off merchant project finance, because the economics improve when someone with a very long balance sheet absorbs risks that ordinary project capital prices brutally.

There’s a second requirement that gets less attention: repetition. Nuclear benefits from freezing designs, carrying experienced teams and suppliers from one project to the next, and building enough units for the learning to stick. China is the strongest possible test of that proposition because it has patient state capital, huge industrial capability and national infrastructure planning. Yet even China has rationalized around evolving reactor families rather than creating the tightly frozen product line that nuclear economics reward and isn't scaling rapidly as a result.

The useful question, then, isn’t whether nuclear is ideologically compatible with capitalism. It’s who carries the construction and revenue risk, who controls design variation, and whether the program is large and disciplined enough for repetition to work.

I worked through the current European financing structures, Britain’s SMR program, China’s standardization problem and what all of that says about the industrial conditions new nuclear actually requires in the latest TFIE Strategy Briefing."

Full analysis:

https://briefing.tfie.io/p/new-nuclear-needs-the-state-to-make

The deeper piece follows the financing structures, risk transfer and standardization problem across Sizewell C, Dukovany, the UK SMR program and China.

I recently came across a striking chart that compares historical projections of nuclear capacity growth with what actually got built. The pattern is damning: every decade since the 1980s, forecasters have drawn steep upward curves projecting 700 to over 1,400 GW of installed nuclear capacity by mid-century. The actual line? It crawled from roughly 260 GW in 1985 to about 370 GW in 2020 — barely a nudge over four decades. Projections from the 1980s alone expected the world to hit 1,000 GW by the year 2000. We're still not close. The gap between what was promised and what was delivered isn't a one-off miscalculation — it's a structural feature of nuclear forecasting, repeated generation after generation.

This matters because the same cycle is starting again with small modular reactors (SMRs) and the "nuclear renaissance" narrative. The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency's own scenarios now range from 347 GW (stagnation) to 1,324 GW (more than tripling) by 2050, with the transformative scenario requiring up to $200 billion per year in OECD capital spending during the 2030s. Yet a peer-reviewed preprint analyzing 75 SMR designs found that vendor-announced deployment schedules are "systematically overoptimistic" across both OECD and non-OECD countries, with only a limited subset of designs having sufficient time to contribute meaningfully before 2050. In Europe, no new large reactors are expected online before 2040, and since the early 2000s the EU has connected just seven new plants while shutting down over 70. This is the mechanism by which investors get fooled: rosy forward-looking scenarios — often produced or commissioned by the industry itself — create an illusion of momentum that draws in capital, but the actual deployment track record tells a story of chronic delays, cost overruns, and cancellations. The gap between announcement and megawatts delivered is where the money disappears.

So let's be clear-eyed. Every decade, the same curve gets redrawn, and every decade, actual capacity falls short by a factor of three to ten. The chart speaks for itself — and so does the peer-reviewed evidence (Nature Communications preprint on SMR deployment realism; NEA Nuclear Energy Outlook 2026; Rabobank analysis on nuclear in Europe's changing power system).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629626001477