Hacker News Reader

Comment by Moldoteck | Hacker News Reader

china wants nuclear to provide 10-20% of their needs. If china wants that, they'll achieve it. Nuclear is extremely competitive in china.

View on HN

competitive is the wrong word. It does not have to compete on price or all in lifecycle cost, because its single party state that owns everything and cant be voted out. But i do agree that if they want it, they'll make it happen.

it's not a wrong word. Competitive - it's in the sesnse of what price can it sell to get profits, even if the price is set by govt. Even our existing fleet of npp is competitive on the market ->

www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html

https://www.ffe.de/en/publications/merit-order-shifts-and-th...

But chinese nuclear is built faster and cheaper vs our units even during messmer in france. So their price guarantee is lower too. Probably similar to what distributed solar got there of 0.4y/kwh in the past. Albeit subsidies for solar were cut last year to stimulate a healthier growth

i mean competitive as in "free market competitive". chinas plants do not have to compete on their own all in costs as a private enterprise, they are majority state owned. So they dont have to pay insurance, cleanup, or long term capex loan interest costs. Which are a huge part of the costs for free-market nukes (and why they dont get built). Plus, the "price" is set between a state owned supplier and a state owned consuming grid ... do you think thats really representative of a true free market price?

Their insurance, cleanup is included in state mandated price. Their capex loans aren't so problematic since it costs about 2.5bn to build and is done in under 5y now

China doesn't have free market in the way we have it anyway. It wasn't valid even for solar

Why do you think insurance and cleanup is included in the price? There’s no reason to believe that for a state industry. Also Capex loans are not paid back when the plant is done, you pay them off gradually out of profits over decades once operation starts. At least that’s how free market finance works.

Anyway it doesn’t matter, we’re quibbling minor semantics, when I think we agree on the main point - what happens in state run china is in no way representative of what’s possible in a free market economy.

Korea is close now. But closest was japanese abwr- cost similar to current Chinese units

Reply on news.ycombinator.com