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.
The video opened with a repeat of the "too cheap to meter" statement. When Lewis Strauss said this in 1954 he was speaking to science journalists about the wonders of science and this specific statement was about his expectations for a project he was running, Project Sherwood, which was an early fusion development project. As his son later noted, Strauss was talking about fusion.
The first four paragraphs here, and the first 10-15 minutes of the video paint a bleak picture about the period before 1962, but in fact these were the first 24 years after the concept of fission was first demonstrated. To build and demonstrate many types of working reactors within 24 years of the concept being developed is extraordinary progress. Compare this with the photoelectric effect. First demonstrated in 1887, but it was not for about 100 years before you could start talk about commercialization.
Recently finished reading "The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times" written by former AEC Chairman Dr. Glenn Seaborg. He spent several chapters on the saga associated with Monticello.
In December 1965 Northern States Power Co decided they needed a new power plant. They had recently completed a fossil plant and had faced a large amount of public criticism for the environmental impact it would have. For the next power plant if they built coal it would be cheaper but decided to go with the more expensive nuclear to avoid the environmental opposition associated with the last fossil plant.
Turned out Monticello would be a test case for state rights versus federal rights. The state issued an effluent discharge that cut the federal radiological effluents by roughly a third. The utilities were strongly opposed to states having the right to dictate radiological limits and strongly petitioned that the AEC should be the agency setting all radiological limits.
The book also covered the fight for the breeder reactor. If you are interested in breeder reactor history in the US, highly recommend this book. Goes into details on Nixon (was ambivalent), Milton Shaw, the Joint Committe on Atomic Energy (who almost exclusively pushed the LMFBR), Fast Flux Test Facility, and the demise of the Light Water Breeder Reactor and the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor programs.
Another illuminating post--really interesting (as are are the well informed comments). Lessons learned from the past hopefully can help guide us in the present and future, for although coal or gas may be cheaper in the short run, considerable evidence points to superior *value* of nuclear in the long run. I really appreciate how Decouple doesn't gloss over past or present challenges!
Back in November 1969 Fortune magazine wrote a fascinating article titled: "The Great Nuclear Fizzle at Old Babcock & Wilcox." It went into depth the problems B&W was having at its Mount Vernon, IN reactor pressure vessel plant (RPV). Management problems, qualified workforce problems, union problems. They ended up sending some of the RPVs to Rotterdam, Paris, Chattanooga and Japan to be finished so they could ease the workload at Mount Vernon. Apparently it wasn't all rainbows and sunshine in the 1960s during the boom years of nuclear construction.
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.
China has much higher installed coal power capacity then installed nuclear power capacity:
"China has ~1,271 GW of operating coal power capacity, over half of the world’s total. 2,621 coal-fired power units are currently active, with over 1,000 more retired or mothballed. The average age of China’s coal fleet is just 12-14 years, compared to an average age of 45 years in the US. 73% of all Chinese coal units are serving heat and operate as combined heat and power (CHP) power plants."
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.
Yes, a few of the very early plants were loss leaders but the six cheapest plants in Overnight cost were Turkey Point 3/4 ($795/kW), Oconee 1/2 ($851/kW), Palisades ($914/kW) Oconee 3 ($923 /kW). The number are from Lovering escalated to 2024 USD. For Turkey Point and Oconee, I have confirmed they are approximately correct from other sources including talking to ex FPL managers. None of these were turnkey contracts. The utilities acted as their own EPC contractor.
Five of these plants are still operating, and are licensed into the 2050's.
Due to its 100,000 to 1 advantage over fossil, a nuclear plant built to 1967 regulation (basically self-regulation) required 40% the concrete and 33% of the steel of a similar sized coal plant. It should be cheaper. Add to that nuclear's massive advantage in fuel cost. It should be no contest.
As it happened, our fear of the bomb resulted in a regulatory system that swallowed up the advantage.
Canada had a different history of course. Nuclear Power Demonstration (20MWe), Douglas Point (200 MWe), and Pickering Units 1 & 2 all had government backed arrangements so that Ontario Hydro would not lose money on these FirstOfAKind builds. For Pickering, the costs of power were compared to Lambton coal fired station. Pickering produced electricity cheaper than Lambton.
Your interviewee had examples of nuclear plants producing electricity as cheap as coal in the early days. Pickering is another example. Keep in mind this is before scrubbers pushed up coal costs. Also, before C was sequestered, which is still not typically done. Health Canada's web site has estimates of annual deaths in Canada from air pollution of 15,000.
Matt Loszac grew up in Ontario, and suffered from asthma till the nuclear buildout ended coal power in the province, and Toronto's smog days. Now he's co-founder of Aalo Atomics, aiming at first chain reaction in their small modular reactor in a month or so.
Nuclear power plants have been opposed for decades by well organized and well funded anti-nuclear organizations, like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council and many, many more. So many politicians choose the easiest option, don't build nuclear power plants.
Wind turbines and solar panels are cheap to install, but the costs of the backup, transportation and grid stabilization are not covered by wind power plants, solar power plants operators, but by the customers.
Under the increasing costs of natural gas and LNG, the situation is slowly changing in some countries. Like Japan restarting its nuclear power plants, Swiss parliament lifting the ban on new nuclear power plants, Belgium reverses phase-out policy.
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.
No, the extra costs come later, trying to match the volatile, dispersed ouput to demand. See Australia's struggles to build Snowy 2.0 (gone from 6 billion dollars to 12 billion, with another major cost blow-out looming); the UK's rising curtailment costs for unuseable wind power (1.5 billion Pounds/year); and the increasing hours of zero and negative value wholesale prices in solar heavy grids. Countries like Denmark, Ireland, and Germany, that have based their power development on wind and solar, have the highest customer power prices in Europe. California too, which mandates rooftop solar and supports grid battery storage, has the highest rates in North America.
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.
The video opened with a repeat of the "too cheap to meter" statement. When Lewis Strauss said this in 1954 he was speaking to science journalists about the wonders of science and this specific statement was about his expectations for a project he was running, Project Sherwood, which was an early fusion development project. As his son later noted, Strauss was talking about fusion.
The first four paragraphs here, and the first 10-15 minutes of the video paint a bleak picture about the period before 1962, but in fact these were the first 24 years after the concept of fission was first demonstrated. To build and demonstrate many types of working reactors within 24 years of the concept being developed is extraordinary progress. Compare this with the photoelectric effect. First demonstrated in 1887, but it was not for about 100 years before you could start talk about commercialization.
Recently finished reading "The Atomic Energy Commission under Nixon: Adjusting to Troubled Times" written by former AEC Chairman Dr. Glenn Seaborg. He spent several chapters on the saga associated with Monticello.
In December 1965 Northern States Power Co decided they needed a new power plant. They had recently completed a fossil plant and had faced a large amount of public criticism for the environmental impact it would have. For the next power plant if they built coal it would be cheaper but decided to go with the more expensive nuclear to avoid the environmental opposition associated with the last fossil plant.
Turned out Monticello would be a test case for state rights versus federal rights. The state issued an effluent discharge that cut the federal radiological effluents by roughly a third. The utilities were strongly opposed to states having the right to dictate radiological limits and strongly petitioned that the AEC should be the agency setting all radiological limits.
The book also covered the fight for the breeder reactor. If you are interested in breeder reactor history in the US, highly recommend this book. Goes into details on Nixon (was ambivalent), Milton Shaw, the Joint Committe on Atomic Energy (who almost exclusively pushed the LMFBR), Fast Flux Test Facility, and the demise of the Light Water Breeder Reactor and the Molten Salt Breeder Reactor programs.
Another illuminating post--really interesting (as are are the well informed comments). Lessons learned from the past hopefully can help guide us in the present and future, for although coal or gas may be cheaper in the short run, considerable evidence points to superior *value* of nuclear in the long run. I really appreciate how Decouple doesn't gloss over past or present challenges!
Back in November 1969 Fortune magazine wrote a fascinating article titled: "The Great Nuclear Fizzle at Old Babcock & Wilcox." It went into depth the problems B&W was having at its Mount Vernon, IN reactor pressure vessel plant (RPV). Management problems, qualified workforce problems, union problems. They ended up sending some of the RPVs to Rotterdam, Paris, Chattanooga and Japan to be finished so they could ease the workload at Mount Vernon. Apparently it wasn't all rainbows and sunshine in the 1960s during the boom years of nuclear construction.
http://www.strategosinc.com/downloads/nuclear_fizzle-dl1.pdf
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.
China has much higher installed coal power capacity then installed nuclear power capacity:
"China has ~1,271 GW of operating coal power capacity, over half of the world’s total. 2,621 coal-fired power units are currently active, with over 1,000 more retired or mothballed. The average age of China’s coal fleet is just 12-14 years, compared to an average age of 45 years in the US. 73% of all Chinese coal units are serving heat and operate as combined heat and power (CHP) power plants."
https://www.repower.world/news/china-operates-more-than-half-of-the-worlds-coal-power-capacity
Currently China has 501 GW coal power capacity under development.
https://globalenergymonitor.org/projects/global-coal-plant-tracker?popup=2629
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.
Yes, a few of the very early plants were loss leaders but the six cheapest plants in Overnight cost were Turkey Point 3/4 ($795/kW), Oconee 1/2 ($851/kW), Palisades ($914/kW) Oconee 3 ($923 /kW). The number are from Lovering escalated to 2024 USD. For Turkey Point and Oconee, I have confirmed they are approximately correct from other sources including talking to ex FPL managers. None of these were turnkey contracts. The utilities acted as their own EPC contractor.
Five of these plants are still operating, and are licensed into the 2050's.
Due to its 100,000 to 1 advantage over fossil, a nuclear plant built to 1967 regulation (basically self-regulation) required 40% the concrete and 33% of the steel of a similar sized coal plant. It should be cheaper. Add to that nuclear's massive advantage in fuel cost. It should be no contest.
As it happened, our fear of the bomb resulted in a regulatory system that swallowed up the advantage.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/humanity-has-been-twice-blest-the
Very interesting, thanks for that.
Canada had a different history of course. Nuclear Power Demonstration (20MWe), Douglas Point (200 MWe), and Pickering Units 1 & 2 all had government backed arrangements so that Ontario Hydro would not lose money on these FirstOfAKind builds. For Pickering, the costs of power were compared to Lambton coal fired station. Pickering produced electricity cheaper than Lambton.
Your interviewee had examples of nuclear plants producing electricity as cheap as coal in the early days. Pickering is another example. Keep in mind this is before scrubbers pushed up coal costs. Also, before C was sequestered, which is still not typically done. Health Canada's web site has estimates of annual deaths in Canada from air pollution of 15,000.
Matt Loszac grew up in Ontario, and suffered from asthma till the nuclear buildout ended coal power in the province, and Toronto's smog days. Now he's co-founder of Aalo Atomics, aiming at first chain reaction in their small modular reactor in a month or so.
Nuclear power plants have been opposed for decades by well organized and well funded anti-nuclear organizations, like Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council and many, many more. So many politicians choose the easiest option, don't build nuclear power plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_organizations
Wind turbines and solar panels are cheap to install, but the costs of the backup, transportation and grid stabilization are not covered by wind power plants, solar power plants operators, but by the customers.
Under the increasing costs of natural gas and LNG, the situation is slowly changing in some countries. Like Japan restarting its nuclear power plants, Swiss parliament lifting the ban on new nuclear power plants, Belgium reverses phase-out policy.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-democracy/parliament-reopens-the-door-to-nuclear-power/91611423
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/belgium-reverses-phase-out-policy-as-denmark-reconsiders-nuclear
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.
No, the extra costs come later, trying to match the volatile, dispersed ouput to demand. See Australia's struggles to build Snowy 2.0 (gone from 6 billion dollars to 12 billion, with another major cost blow-out looming); the UK's rising curtailment costs for unuseable wind power (1.5 billion Pounds/year); and the increasing hours of zero and negative value wholesale prices in solar heavy grids. Countries like Denmark, Ireland, and Germany, that have based their power development on wind and solar, have the highest customer power prices in Europe. California too, which mandates rooftop solar and supports grid battery storage, has the highest rates in North America.