r/uninsurable

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.

It won't be long before that figure is 100%. At first, that won't be for the full year, but that will happen too. And as renewables adoption tends to race ahead of predictions, it will probably happen sooner than many people expect.

Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns Diablo Canyon, quotes its operating cost as $8.4 billion for the period 2024-30. Or $1.4 billion a year. An obvious question arises. Why pay $1.4 billion a year for something you don't need? There are 400+ other nuclear plants around the world. How long before the same economic reality comes for them?

The obvious solution for PG&E and other nuclear operators might be to start courting the data center sector. At least if nuclear-powered AI ever went Skynet, it would be easy to switch it off. I think humanity would have a much better chance of taking out 400 vulnerable targets, as opposed to countless millions of solar panels decentralized around the planet.

California Grid May/Apr 2026 Renewables Curtailment Figures, Source: California Grid Operator CAISO.

Diablo Canyon Operating Costs, Source: PG&E.

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

If you don't like nuclear energy, don't worry we have more reasons to maintain it, such as research into gravitational force.

That, there are only four fundamental forces, man!

https://zenodo.org/records/20093526