Excellent post, really interesting. I'd love to know more on how the French case played out, where as I understand it the State did take direct charge of the country's powerful nuclear build-out. I get that the US has the largest fleet in the world, but France today has almost 1 GW per million people, more than three times the US level. It’s impressive and almost all of it a direct result of the Messmer Plan, back in the 1970s. I hope I get to read about that someday, if you have material on it. Thanks
GE and Westinghouse invented the playbook every technology industry has run since. Sell below cost to create the impression of a viable market. Let the customer build confidence on a price that was never real. Then stop subsidising and hope the demand survives the correction. The nuclear industry discovered what happens next in the 1970s when costs rose five-fold and the order book collapsed. Uber discovered the same thing when the $5 ride became the $25 ride. AI labs are in the middle of discovering it right now.
The parallel to the current moment is almost exact. Brad DeLong wrote yesterday about the end of the "$5 Uber era" for AI, where frontier labs are raising prices because the subsidy no longer makes strategic sense. The structural question is the same one GE faced in 1966: did the subsidised period create enough genuine demand that customers will pay the real price, or did it create demand for a price that never existed? Nuclear's answer was that utilities wanted cheap nuclear, not nuclear. When cheap disappeared, so did most of the enthusiasm. Whether AI's answer is different depends on whether the productivity is real enough to survive the bill.
When nuclear power is cheap, it often means a country still has the ability to continuously organize complex industrial systems. When nuclear power becomes expensive, it often means that ability has begun to erode.
Nuclear power is never just an energy technology. A nuclear plant is the final product of engineering teams, heavy equipment suppliers, regulators, financiers, construction workers, project managers, and long-term political commitment. These capabilities survive only through repetition.
This is the real problem in the United States. America still has the world’s largest operating nuclear fleet, but it no longer has a continuous nuclear construction pipeline. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were important because they exposed how difficult it has become for the U.S. system to build again: the project moved from an expected cost of around $14 billion to roughly $30 billion, with years of delay.
China shows the opposite dynamic. It now has 60 reactors in operation, 36 under construction, and 16 more approved. The most important fact is not the reactor count itself, but the continuity behind it: one batch operates, another is built, and the next is already approved.
That continuity preserves industrial memory. Engineering teams do not disperse. Suppliers keep investing. Designs become more standardized. Regulators become more familiar. Financing routines become repeatable. Nuclear construction becomes a system, not an exception.
This is why the China-U.S. nuclear gap is increasingly a gap in organizational capacity. America still has the stock. China is building the flow. And in complex infrastructure, the ability to keep building may matter more than the size of the fleet inherited from the past.
Couldnt have put it better myself! Nuclear is the ultimate litmus test for whether a society can come together to plant the trees whose shade our children will sit in. Ofcourse it is so because of the technical, financial, regulatory challenges are top tier and the ROI is long term.
The stated cost to Westinghouse for Point Beach is not completely correct. As a former employee (20+ years) of Wisconsin Electric / Nuclear Management / NextEra Energy at PBNP, I can state that there were a number of "change orders", etc. that Westinghouse hit WEPCo with. I was privy to see a number of internal memos that were in the WEPCo archives where the original Plant Manager (Glen Reed) complained about the number of change orders that Westinghouse submitted not just during initial construction, but after putting Unit 1 on line, followed by Unit 2 about two years later.
While a number of these were disputed & negotiated, the final number they recieved was higher.
In quite a few countries the talk of nuclear is not followed by action. Renewables is talked about AND put onto action. Just a few more turbines and solar panels added without huge upfront costs.
Excellent post, really interesting. I'd love to know more on how the French case played out, where as I understand it the State did take direct charge of the country's powerful nuclear build-out. I get that the US has the largest fleet in the world, but France today has almost 1 GW per million people, more than three times the US level. It’s impressive and almost all of it a direct result of the Messmer Plan, back in the 1970s. I hope I get to read about that someday, if you have material on it. Thanks
There's a couple of episodes deep in the archives. https://www.decouple.media/p/the-preconditions-of-frances-nuclear-70b
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DskoKoxISoE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isgu-VrD0oM
https://www.decouple.media/p/french-nuclear-energy-and-social-865
Thank you! I'll watch them
My understanding is that we don’t really know how much France spent, and some of it is shrouded in the national security budget.
GE and Westinghouse invented the playbook every technology industry has run since. Sell below cost to create the impression of a viable market. Let the customer build confidence on a price that was never real. Then stop subsidising and hope the demand survives the correction. The nuclear industry discovered what happens next in the 1970s when costs rose five-fold and the order book collapsed. Uber discovered the same thing when the $5 ride became the $25 ride. AI labs are in the middle of discovering it right now.
The parallel to the current moment is almost exact. Brad DeLong wrote yesterday about the end of the "$5 Uber era" for AI, where frontier labs are raising prices because the subsidy no longer makes strategic sense. The structural question is the same one GE faced in 1966: did the subsidised period create enough genuine demand that customers will pay the real price, or did it create demand for a price that never existed? Nuclear's answer was that utilities wanted cheap nuclear, not nuclear. When cheap disappeared, so did most of the enthusiasm. Whether AI's answer is different depends on whether the productivity is real enough to survive the bill.
Great essay!
When nuclear power is cheap, it often means a country still has the ability to continuously organize complex industrial systems. When nuclear power becomes expensive, it often means that ability has begun to erode.
Nuclear power is never just an energy technology. A nuclear plant is the final product of engineering teams, heavy equipment suppliers, regulators, financiers, construction workers, project managers, and long-term political commitment. These capabilities survive only through repetition.
This is the real problem in the United States. America still has the world’s largest operating nuclear fleet, but it no longer has a continuous nuclear construction pipeline. Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were important because they exposed how difficult it has become for the U.S. system to build again: the project moved from an expected cost of around $14 billion to roughly $30 billion, with years of delay.
China shows the opposite dynamic. It now has 60 reactors in operation, 36 under construction, and 16 more approved. The most important fact is not the reactor count itself, but the continuity behind it: one batch operates, another is built, and the next is already approved.
That continuity preserves industrial memory. Engineering teams do not disperse. Suppliers keep investing. Designs become more standardized. Regulators become more familiar. Financing routines become repeatable. Nuclear construction becomes a system, not an exception.
This is why the China-U.S. nuclear gap is increasingly a gap in organizational capacity. America still has the stock. China is building the flow. And in complex infrastructure, the ability to keep building may matter more than the size of the fleet inherited from the past.
Couldnt have put it better myself! Nuclear is the ultimate litmus test for whether a society can come together to plant the trees whose shade our children will sit in. Ofcourse it is so because of the technical, financial, regulatory challenges are top tier and the ROI is long term.
The stated cost to Westinghouse for Point Beach is not completely correct. As a former employee (20+ years) of Wisconsin Electric / Nuclear Management / NextEra Energy at PBNP, I can state that there were a number of "change orders", etc. that Westinghouse hit WEPCo with. I was privy to see a number of internal memos that were in the WEPCo archives where the original Plant Manager (Glen Reed) complained about the number of change orders that Westinghouse submitted not just during initial construction, but after putting Unit 1 on line, followed by Unit 2 about two years later.
While a number of these were disputed & negotiated, the final number they recieved was higher.
In quite a few countries the talk of nuclear is not followed by action. Renewables is talked about AND put onto action. Just a few more turbines and solar panels added without huge upfront costs.