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Comment by dalyons | Hacker News Reader

They’re not financially attractive in other parts of the world either. China, a zero litigation single party state, is building some but a tiny % compared to their renewable buildout

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They need a lot of energy from a variety of sources. China has 30 or so reactors under construction (half or so of all active projects).

"China currently has 58 operable reactors with a total capacity of 56.9 GW. A further 30 reactors, with a total capacity of 34.4 GW are under construction" [1]

So, yes, but...

China installed 256GW of solar in the first 6 months of 2025 [2]. A full year estimate of ~350gw. So, the total of all nuclear under construction is 1/10th of the solar they installed in one year.

Don't get me wrong, its cool to see diversity of non fossil sources, glad they are building some, but its a niche in their overall energy buildout. And they can only build that small niche because they dont have to be market priced, its state subsidized.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/ten-new-reactors... [2] https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/global-solar-install...

Comparing nuclear reactor capacity to solar capacity is misleading because renewable capacity dramatically overstates actual generation. IIRC The capacity factor for solar ranges between %5-%25 of total capacity generated.

Yes yes, one of the usual reflexive context free points repeated every time solar comes up. Whatever the actual capacity factor is(5% is not a serious number ), I’m sure chinas energy planners know that, it’s hardly a gotcha. And still they’ve choose to build solar at a volume massively dwarfing nuclear

(Edit: cycomanic explained it much better and more patiently than me)

I don't think it's reflexive to point out that evaluating the headline numbers like that is misleading. People who are new to the topic will misinformed if they think you're describing an apples to apples comparison.

The issue is that even with your correction the point stands. You weren't refuting, you were being irrelevant.

That doesn't significantly change the argument. Most solar plants have capacity factors of around 20% (5% might apply to home systems, but not commerical), compared to nuclear which has around 80%. So a factor of 4. So numbers change a bit on the previous poster, China just installed 3x more solar in 1 year than all the nuclear under construction, or they essentially installed the same amout of solar in one year as all existing and under construction nuclear combined. And if we look at projections, next year they likely will install twice as much solar...

While China is often put up as the poster child for nuclear power, they are actually a great example of how nuclear is being overtaken by renewables. China's 2019 plan was that by 2035 nuclear would account for ~8% of generated electricity (up from ~5%). Since then percentage dropped to 4.5% (and the drop seems to be accelerating). Unless something dramatically changes nuclear will account for less than 4% (not the planned 8%) of generated electricity by 2035. All that is due to the raise of renewables (largely solar). I suspect we will not see China build close to those projected 200 GW and the percentage to be even lower, just due to the exponential growth in solar.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

As if their massive solar production (and innovation) is market based...

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