this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2025
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Of course. Renewable blows nuclear out of orbit when it comes to price. Nuclear plants take decades to build and are generally a lot more expensive than estimated.
The Vogtle scam's end cost was $17/watt. $8B or $4/watt was just financing costs prior to eventual operation that Georgia Power got to charge its customers for its share, over the 20 years before it gave them power from the boondoggle.
Solar costs under $1/watt to deploy, and batteries in a container (can fit under solar) costs $1 per 10 watt-hours of storage. Both last over 30 years.
SMR's can pretend lower capital costs per watt, when excluding design/prototype time, but trade much more expensive enriched (proliferation risk) fuel that is less efficient, needs breeder reactors to provide likely from Russia, and carries higher security costs per watt. SMRs are simply a new scam to defraud investors with because nuclear is worthless as energy, and only ever is for military applications.
The primary appeal of SMRs is their portability. Pointless for a data center, but vital for a large vehicle like a cruise liner or a shipping frigate.
Replacing our fleet of bunker fuel powered ships would be enormously beneficial.
There are micro/nano nuclear designs meant to fit in a truck trailer. They are under 1mw power, and not meant to be affordable for those who need more power than that. They are not space efficient to power ships. They may never be made, and just investor scams.
As for shipping, civilian use would be nightmare. Virginia class nuclear subs cost $2.7B. 5x more 2.2B more than best diesel submarines and have operational costs that are 4x higher than diesel subs. Wind power is path to decarbonizing shipping. That chinese airborne blimp windmill posted recently would work.
Submarines aren't normally used for bulk transport of civilian cargo.
The prototype NS Savannah cost $46M to build in 1955 (roughly $500B today) with half the cost being its nuclear engine. So, on the high end of modern container shipping, but with the benefits of rarely needing to refuel.
And that's before an economy of scale on bulk construction.
Sailing ships don't operate well at the scale we're building.
The nuclear industry likes to lowball the cost of SMRs (heart of nuclear ships), but the overall cost difference of power types is the truth. Aircraft carriers are also 4x the cost of diesel, but with only 2x the operational costs (inclusive of similar functions of managing planes). An aircraft carrier requires 1000 extra crew to supervise the reactor.
That's mostly because the west has become a bad place to build things, bike-shedding and a general loss of nuclear building expertise lost due to successful campaigning against nuclear by the fossil fuel industry.
We could be scaling up nuclear right now to help the goals for 2050 to be reached and then coast for a while as renewables pickup pace and fusion is finally cracked.
But no only thing people care about is immediate cost.
Yes renewables are cheaper per kw at the moment but they are also putting a lot of strain on the grid that's not accounted for that's expensive to upgrade, they are also not scaling up fast enough, which means there will be added cost to climate change.
Vs we could build nuclear reactors at a loss and bring on serious gigawatts of clean energy in a decade that would provide a stable baseline.
The west, the east, the north, the south... Wherever you build your reactor it will overshoot its estimated budget and wil be overshadowed by renewables.
But yes, there are many variables and the answer always lies in differentiating.