Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.
and they do. Unlike Denmark, China is the world's factory and can use the windfall from exports to fund projects and have them on its balance sheet.
they already are a major importer of energy
Like you say, a lot of countries get a pass because a neighbour invested billions and decades building nuclear. Or else they fall back to coal/gas.
Perhaps I missed that, is there a source link?
Perhaps you'd be kind enough to link to which part of this thread gives that context, as you see it.
Without it, the Danish people would experience regular black outs.
Of course, both China and Denmark can do much better than me at every level, but like I said, analogy.
* I think theoretically I am allowed to install a wind turbine, but same applies.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
If the former, we may see China's coal consumption fall off a cliff, since the marginal cost of renewables is approximately zero. If so, it'll appear that the coal plants were overbuilt.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
Worthy of note for any readers new to this, electricity generation alone (which this figure is) is but a subset of energy consumption (fuel for transport, energy usage in industry) overall. Further not all human origin greenhouse gases come from energy consumption - coal and other fossil carbon sources are used as raw materials in industry (steel, fertiliser, etc) via processes that bind some of that fossil carbon away from the atmosphere and release a portion to the atmosphere as by product.
There's still work to be done on reduction of fossil carbon source extraction, CO2 capture from industrial processes, and direct CO2 capture from free atmosphere to mitigate the risks of over insulation for future generations.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.
And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.
Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
The answer is obviously that it delivers when they don't.
Every power plant has to hit a certain average price per kWh, and the ones with a variable operating cost (fossil fuels) also need a minimum price in order to generate right now, since the cost of fuel is a significant part of their costs.
What this means is that nuclear does pretty well in a market with high volatility, because its fuel cost is negligible so it can sell for $0.04/kWh when other supply is available and $1/kWh when it isn't, and end up at a viable average. Meanwhile solar never gets the $1/kWh because the reason the price is that high then is that the sun is down and the batteries are low.
> We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants.
This is just putting a battery storage unit at the site of an existing power plant because it already has a stout grid connection.
> Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
Pushing the bottom up during the times when other generation methods have low output does help with the hard part.
But if we're talking about moving from a model where nukes run ~100% of the time (excluding maintenance) to one where they just cover the 1/x portion of the time that zero-fuel-cost renewables (+ storage) can't, then wouldn't nuke's cost per kwh end up 'x' times higher than before as a result because we still have the same amortized costs split over fewer generating hours per year, and nuke fuel cost is negligible?
Nobody is talking about doing that. Nuclear plants are baseload. They always run 100% of the time because even if the current price of electricity is low, their incremental cost savings from reducing output is basically zero, so any positive price means they remain at full output.
This means you don't want 100% nuclear generation, because you don't have constant load. If you have 10GW of demand at night and 20GW during the day then you don't want 20GW of nuclear and nothing to do with half of it at night. But having 5 to 10GW is good, because you never need less than that anyway.
The thing people don't seem to have caught onto yet is that the combination of solar being cheap and solar not generating anything at night means that the price at night is going to be higher not just than it is during the day, but than it has been historically, because now whatever you're using to supply power at night -- regardless of what it is -- has to recover most of its capex exclusively at night. That's not great for nuclear but it's even worse for most other things. On top of that, the most competitive real alternative to nuclear there is natural gas, which doesn't work if you want to stop emitting CO2.
Pretending they can just do “baseload” in 2026 doesn’t work. They can bid negative, but that’s just extending the life of the plant a few extra years.
And you still haven’t been able to explain why consumers should buy ruinously expensive nuclear electricity when cheap renewables or stored renewables are available.
And this is today a purely physical problem. You only need to look to Australia to see grids where rooftop solar today crowds out all other sources, even utility scale renewables. How do you force them to buy ruinously expensive grid based nuclear?
A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.
Gas turbines are cheap in CAPEX and expensive in OPEX. They can cope with it, although even they have trouble with the sliver of hours left after solar, wind and storage make up the bulk. Since that’s a far slimmer portion than their bread and butter peaking style of operation
You're kind of answering your own question when you can't call them "cheap stored renewables". Ask yourself why the price is lower in France than in Spain.
"Stored renewables" are fairly expensive even on the days when renewable output is high. When renewable output is low they're not even available because you had no surplus generation to charge the batteries during the day and now the sun is down and they're empty.
> A new nuclear plant only making its money during the night becomes stupidly expensive. And nuclear is hit harder by this than say an open cycle gas turbine running carbon neutral fuels.
A nuclear plant is hit lighter than this than a gas turbine because it still generates during the day. And when your concern is cost, are you aware of what it costs to produce "carbon neutral fuels"? That's original electricity generation cost + fuel production infrastructure cost + conversion losses + fuel storage cost + conversion losses again + capital cost for the rarely used fuel-burning generators. That's the thing that's ruinously expensive.
Because in France a quite high proportion of the very high real total cost of nuclear is paid by the taxpayer.
French ahead: https://makarevitch.com/edfHistorique
For hydrogen is gas turbines you’re right that the electricity thus produced is rather expensive, but keep in mind that it will only be used a few hundred hours a year. Total system cost can hence still be cheaper than the alternatives.
The up-front cost of just the battery itself isn't the total cost. You have to add installation, land, time value of money (interest) since you're paying up front for something and then only getting those charge cycles over several years, etc.
Ends up being 10-20c/kWh, and that's on top of what you pay for the electricity to put into it.
Also gets worse the more capacity you want to have, because then you're doing less than a full charge cycle more of the time, which means it takes you longer to do those few thousand cycles, which means you pay more in interest.
From (2022): https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-04-05/battery-solar...
So it seems like even if you run nuclear 100% of the time, you’re not going to earn much of anything or may even need to pay the negative rates if you don’t stop feeding into the grid, for a number of hours per day, so I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover nuclear’s existing (noticeable) amortized costs?
And the trend line of renewable and storage costs getting cheaper doesn’t seem to be stopping.
There is a huge difference between prices hitting zero from time to time and the year-long average daytime price being zero. The latter is the thing that would bankrupt solar because that's when all of its generation occurs.
> with storage we’re also already seeing solar cover significant demand even after sunset.
Which is completely expected, because a moderate amount of storage can be used to smooth out time of day misalignment of demand with supply, and it makes sense to charge that with solar during the day whenever it's available. But the thing that's displacing is peaker plants rather than baseload.
> I don’t see how you get around having fewer hours per day to cover
It's not about being exactly 24 hours every day. It's about averaging 20+ hours every day instead of 12, and getting not just all 24 hours but also the higher price for all 24 hours on the days when the output of other generation methods is lower.
Expect that the price per kWh at any given time is inversely correlated with renewable output. What does that do to the profitability of renewables and what does it to do the profitability of something whose output is uncorrelated with renewable output?
(Yes there is a small amount of legacy nuke in California too.)
It Three Mile Island that proved nuclear as a very bad business case- since then the government has completely stepped in.
This is where you're wrong. That is the big problem for nuclear in particular. You just can't recover your capex during the night. The night is the low demand time anyway, and you are still competing with wind etc.. Nobody wants to build new nuclear reactors, because it's not economically viable. In fact operators even want to turn off reactors because even their running cost are too high (happened in Sweden, a while ago. IIRC the government wanted to turn it back on for political reasons).
Either way. France is wholly unable to build new nuclear given the outcome of Flamanville 3 and the ruinously expensive proposed subsides for the EPR2 fleet.
While Germany still pays for expensive early renewables. Back before the industry exploded in scale.
The relevant question is where to spend the next 100b to get the most decarbonization the fastest, today.
I searched wholesale costs - the first result - click 'Monthly' for the easiest view to digest: https://ember-energy.org/data/european-electricity-prices-an...
I also wonder how much of electricity costs in recent years have more to do with things like:
- Did France previously largely pay off the cost of building their old nuclear plants, while Germany has been spending heavily in recent years to majorly change their generation mix and build new generation? I've also heard that even France is now facing some significant challenges with the needed replacement of nukes nearing their retirement age being costly.
- How much of French and German generation buildouts were covered by the gov instead of ratepayers, if any?
However, I haven't researched the above questions.
The 100b should be given to France to build its EPR2 fleet and save the italian electrical grid and provide backup to spanish solar production.
The problem with nuclear is that it doesn’t solve stability. When cold spells hit Europe the French exports turn into imports. So all the French neighbors needs enough backup capacity, generally fossil based today, to both make up for the French exports vanishing, they experiencing the same cold spell, and exporting to France.
Stick two French grids next to each other and they would quickly collapse due to how brittle they are.
All renewable are still subsidized now, at all time, without subsidy no renewable would be installed in europe currently, they would be crushed by nuclear production (who can sell at loss event when renewable are available). Most of the modulation of nuclear reactor is cause because nuclear is pushed out of the marked by subsidized renewable would be sold at loss otherwise.
https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/electricity-trad...
You can look at the graphs there is no correlation between winter and imports and France mostly export at all time. You are just making things up. Nuclear production does not depend on the weather and the french production is exactly sized for the french consumption. Historically France used hydro as the other pilotable part of its mix (before the pan european electric grid and exchanges at spot price). Don't look at special events since 2020, look at the graphs for the last forty years.
But the economics of nuclear vs. renewables have drastically changed with current solar/solar+battery costs (without subsidies) which make it very difficult to justify new construction of nuclear in 2026. Plus, apart from the per megawatt price comparison, the most recent examples of new nuclear projects in the west have been plagued by budget overruns and deadlines repeatedly pushed years into the future.
Huge amounts of new solar/solar+batteries come online every year: it's a boring, proven investment at this point and actively benefiting from the learning curve given the rapid cadence and relatively short timelines for new construction. So your suggestion to give France a huge amount of money for nuclear over renewables, in the hopes that new plants could come online in 5-10 years (likely getting later pushed to 15+ years with individual projects scaled down/cancelled) seems driven more by a sentimental attachment to nuclear than objective weighing of pros/cons.
I get it, I'm a 90s kid and thought nuclear was the absolute coolest thing ever, staring at pictures of glowing pools while growing up and amazed by the idea of entire cities powered by a few semi-trucks worth of rocks. And I do regret that we missed the opportunity to take full advantage of its potential during its heyday. But technology is always changing and with every passing year it becomes increasingly hard to justify new nuclear construction against solar + batteries, both because of raw cost per MW and well known weaknesses not shared by solar.
I'm not even speaking about the transport network overhaul needed to integrate so much distributed and uneven production, it's humongous cost still non budgeted by most countries (see the drama about power lines between spain and france), a lot more than the price of 20 new nuclear reactors (want to move 20Gw of intermittent PV power from spain to poland ? good luck).
60% of the newly installed PV are from China and Europe, both zone with an hugely distorted energy market, for different reasons. Europe is victim of Germany political choice to abandon nuclear power and over reaction to climate change (compared to the rest of the world), all their neighbors are angry at them. And China is edging geopolitical risk of being cut of from oil by over-investing in independent energy generation. Japan historically did the same (why did the japan economy not collapse after Fukushima and nearly stopping all their nuclear reactors ? France would have collapsed in the same situation. It did not collapse because knowing they are an island and so cannot rely on neighbors, they had double the needed production as thermal electric power generation, that's why, same situation for Great Britain but they mainly rely on power links to France and Benelux). If PV was such a cheap/easily deployable/marvel technology you would see more development from under-developped countries like in Africa or South-America, or from isolated developed countries like Japan; it's not the case, much come from already highly developed economic zone (EU and China, but not the USA, for contrarian ideological reason, see Trump/Republican/BigOil) which would have no need for it if raw economic calculus was applied (Gernamy would still have nuclear power, Italy too, and the grid would have been developed before deploying new power generation everywhere).
If you are right why is Italy (which does not have the installed industrial migth around nuclear of France) is intending to create new nuclear power generation if PV/wind are ideal ? Are they stupid ?
Wind has a slight positive correlation to demand, but the storage requirement for wind can be calculated as weeks/months compared to hours for solar.
Sweden also has a free market for electricity without any price roofs. That mean prices can be zero for long periods during the summer when solar is overproducing, but it can also reach over €1 per kw/h during periods of supply shortage. Have the record price for 5 days and have the remaining 360 days free of charge, and you would still end up paying more than if you paid the average cost for a full year (to be fair, in the cheapest of the 4 energy regions).
To add some more aspect for the Swedish energy grid, currently the south of Sweden that is connected to the Danish and German grid are suffering from significant supply shortage. The main power plant to address this is an old Oil power plant that was supposed to exist only as reserve energy, but have since a few years now been running every day throughout the year.
There is construction of more new thermal power plants. The two main strategy to solve the shortage, split along the two political lines, is either nuclear or to combine wind power with power plants burning bio fuel and then carbon capture the emissions (both being technologies with absolutely zero controversies). The later is what is being constructed right now, while nuclear might see construction in the future.
System studies find that renewable energy systems are cheaper than involving new nuclear in both Denmark and Finland.
The thermal plant you are complain about mothballed one of its two burners last autumn when the contract for firm emergency reserve capacity ended.
The final burner stayed open only with a new emergency reserve contract. Last time I checked it has ran like 50-100 hours per year. Never being called in as emergency reserve, although stepping up to hot standby a few times.
They also reactivated a mothballed CCGT plant in the same region for emergency reserve duties. But that was based on the war in Ukraine and ensuring local preparedness rather than needing the electricity.
And if you want to believe a different reality, please convince the political parties in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and so on to replace existing thermal power plants with renewable energy, and to stop construction of new ones! The green party in Sweden went into the election that we had just a few weeks ago on a energy platform that said: Thermal power plants are essential to enable renewable energy and keep prices low. Not even they believe that you can replace thermal power plants with only renewable energy and storage. Their local branch in south of Sweden is part of the coalition that approved and support the current construction of the new thermal power plant, together with the carbon capture plan.
Not that people read sources, but here is the reality check (all naturally in Swedish):
https://www.energinyheter.se/20251021/33900/nytt-varmekraftv... - The construction of the new thermal power plant
https://www.energinyheter.se/20261002/35404/oresundskraft-in... - The addition of carbon capture and storage (CCS)
https://www.mp.se/politik/energi/ and https://www.di.se/debatt/sank-priserna-satsa-pa-fjarr-och-kr... - The Swedish Green Party and their view of thermal power plants
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
> system costs are comprised by overcapacity of the technology itself, electrolysers and hydrogen storage, back-up power, influence on spinning reserve and transmission systems cost.
Green hydrogen storage solution has shown to be much more expensive than what earlier studies predicted, and are still not economical competitive to be used in industries that need the hydrogen itself rather than burning it for electricity.
> Thus, the simulation of, e.g., nuclear power involves back-up-power and peak-load power in order to cover all hourly electricity demands in a least-cost manner
This is an assumption that they don't explore.
> It should be emphasized that all the alternatives have exactly the same use of biomass and they all contribute with carbon for CCU, CCS and biochar to achieve a fully climate neutral society in all sectors including agriculture, industrial processes and LULUCF.
Again, they explicitly claim that all their solutions must burn fuel for electricity.
> The “LC mix biomass restricted” alternative is still comprised by a least-cost combination of offshore wind power (84%), solar PV (13%) and CCGT (3%)
> CCGT and therefore also the least-cost mix either use natural gas or biomethane
CCGT, as is thermal power plants, which is what is exactly what Sweden is constructing and what I linked above. A combination of wind, solar, and burning fuel for power. The difference between LC mix biomass restricted and least cost mix is how much fuel that grid is expected to burn.
Their model of just 3% CCGT do fly a bit against what Denmark is doing. They have over 100% wind capacity, and yet need to import almost 50% of the energy demand. Reducing that imports to 3% seems a bit like wishful thinking.
If the intent was disprove the need for thermal power plants by linking to that study, then the study itself disproves that in no unclear terms. The result of the study is that combining wind, solar and gas is the cheapest strategy to generate electricity.
Variability and fuel costs have nothing to do with why nuclear is a bad idea. The problem why nuclear is expensive is that all the cost comes from capex, which is huge in comparison to all the other sources (which is also the reason why trying to quickly bring down emissions with nuclear is so fraud). But because they are not variable, nuclear has to accept the price which is set by other sources.
This is actually illustrated by Denmark. They are a net importer of electricity in terms of kWh, but a net exporter in Dollar amounts. In other words their energy mix allows them to export when prices are high and import when prices are low.
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar
Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.
https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/forsmark-2-ur-drift-pa-agarna...
You need something with low CAPEX to do that. Which is the complete opposite of nuclear power.
Guess you just explained how one investor was convinced: the government.
Why? Because governments don't think in quarterly reports and short term profits, but also have to make strategic investments in stability. Ignoring the existence of baseload power needs is classical fallacy of "solar-pilled" westerners with the luxury of having 24/7 power from sources they are willing to ignore. I'm saying this with solar panels on top the house I'm living, and charging an electric car from them.
Solar and wind are not a panacea, and batteries won't solve all power needs, it is the same mindset as outsourcing polluting and humanely taxing industries to China or the third world and acting if we solved environmental or ethics problems, because we can now conveniently nott see them.
If we stop our industry, and civil infrastructure for the night, sure, no need for baseload, just some batteries... wish nobody wants to make a tea, make food, smelt aluminum at night...
Solar and wind have been branded as unreliable by propogandists working for billionaire fossil fuel magnates, oil sheiks, and oligarchs.
The converse is true: distributed power generation and storage is incredibly robust and can easily meet the needs of our civilization even under active attack.
If you want long term thinking, if you want robustness over short term profits, then solar + wind + batteries are you answer.
No super power can blockade the sun and wind.
No super power can blow up every rooftop panel without also nuking entire cities.
You should look at some WW2 footage of German cities.
The wind doesn't stop blowing at night.
> batteries won't solve all power needs
Citation please.
In 2025 I calculated it would cost only a year of German GDP for batteries to power Germany for 6 months. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45443098
That's an absurd amount of batteries that would never be needed. And batteries have only gotten cheaper since then.
It is still intermittent, not available in such an amount everywhere, also when we take out insane amounts of energy from wind, weather patterns might be effected. Just because we ignored the global effects of mass-deployment of fossil fuel usage,m and are seeing the effects of "negligible amounts" of CO2 released, why should we ignore the effects of other antropocenic effects?
> Citation please. > In 2025 I calculated it would cost only a year of German GDP for batteries to power Germany for 6 months. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45443098
I MADE IT UP, just like you "citing" your earlier HN post :)
Once again, you ignore that if you would make such insane amount of demand, supply couldn't keep up, and the price would definitely be effected.
Energy needs to be transported, stored. You need to solve winter heating, and energy needs of heavy industry, lot of which cannot be intermittently turned on/off and needing insane amounts of energy. Oh, I'm wrong, you can luckily ignore that, as that has been already closed down to the current energy strategy based on your single-minded approach, so we don't need to solve such demand, when it magically disappears. As long as the coffee machines and the macbooks can be powered we are all well.
Also it is not insane amount? For half a year's GDP Hungary gets a nuclear power plant that can power the 30% of the country's energy needs for ~60 years (plus some fuel cost)...
Holy heck. I knew nuclear was expensive but that is absurd. Only 30%? And it's not going to run 60 years with 0 additional maintenance.
Looking at the United States government since the end of the Cold War I don't see a lot of "strategic investments in stability" but rather a lot of technically legal bribery to enable short term profits.
yes, if magic unlimited free power arrives nuclear will turn out useless
if it will not, then it provides some stability to energy grid and ensures that low polluting, resilient source of power exists
somehow I think that risk of magic unlimited free power appearing is low - and if it appears, then costs of contracted power will be now negligible
personally I prefer to pay a bit more for reduced risk of blackouts
That's a bit cruel, because no such nuclear plant has ever been built and operated, anywhere in the world. :)
But right now we do not have excessive capacity and smoothing the curve for nuclear allows to burn less coal and natural gas. Essentially right now batteries are killing peaker natural gas plants, not nuclear or coal.
500GW of power at 40% utilisation gets you the same amount of energy as 250GW of power at 80% utilisation, and [roughly] the same CO2 emissions. But 500GW of Solar PV is shadowed effectively by the former where it would not be possible with the latter (without ludicrous amounts of storage). You couldn't choose that in the US or Europe without some kind of sophisticated compensation scheme because it's not profitable, but China does not need to care whether it is profitable only whether it can be done.
I think for places like the US there will be a lot of stranded energy generation and related assets and Capitalism will struggle to make that work even if somebody competent was in charge which of course today they are not.
"Not profitable" often has a strong correlation with "not efficient".
To begin with, you don't want to be burning coal even 40% of the time. The US generates ~15% of electricity from coal, China ~50%. Coal is the worst for both CO2 and air pollution, significantly worse than even natural gas. It's also worse than natural gas for non-continuous use because gas turbines at least respond quickly to load changes, whereas coal uses steam turbines that respond slowly the same as nuclear. And if you're going to do that in your "command economy" then why aren't you doing it with nuclear instead of coal?
> I think for places like the US there will be a lot of stranded energy generation and related assets and Capitalism will struggle to make that work even if somebody competent was in charge which of course today they are not.
The things that become stranded assets are the fossil fuel (especially coal) power plants, because they aren't viable to operate at times when the price of electricity is below their fuel cost.
It basically means they can't compete with solar during the day (unless it's cloudy and solar isn't available), whereas nuclear can because the negligible fuel cost means it can take any current price as long as it hits a given average price, and it can bring the average up at night. Which means that coal isn't even competitive with nuclear, since nuclear is getting something during the day whereas coal gets nothing, requiring coal to receive an even higher price than nuclear when renewable output is low and then gets out-competed by nuclear.
But the obvious solution to this is to stop burning coal whatsoever. Use nuclear for baseload, solar and wind for cheap variable generation with storage to smooth it out over the course of a day, and hydro or natural gas peaker plants combined with demand pricing to handle extended periods of low renewable output.
In capitalism, coal dies, so why is the "command economy" keeping it alive?
Any solution that doesn't involve everyone agreeing to care about the externalities of coal (air pollution and greenhouse gases) will result in someone continuing to burn a lot of coal.
Or why they need that amount of coal when they have even more hydro than the US, which is much better at load-following than coal and should have been used to displace coal rather than nuclear.
They started way later.
What makes you think hydro displaced nuclear in China?
EDIT: batteries also help on China scale to throttle coal output much more smoothly and efficiently. Eventually the batteries will kill coal but for the next 5 years in China they are making coal plants cheaper to operate.
You keep saying that nuclear can keep operating during the day, because of neglible fuel cost. But fuel cost has absolutely nothing to do with any of this. So even we ignore opex, if you have to earn $100 a day to earn back your capex investment, if the price during the day is such that you can sell electricity for $0, yes you can still run your plant, but if prices allow you to only earn $80 during the night, you're still loosing money. So it's still a terrible investment. Calculations get worse if prices go negative during the day (but your plant can't easily be switched off) or if we include opex.
Moreover, other technology like batteries, are on an exponential trajectory. So average price differences between night and day are likely going to drop.
Nuclear has declined as a share of power being built out in 5 year plans. The projected output of nuclear in 2030 is 100GW vs 2800GW for solar+wind.
The majority of the electricity they actually generate is from coal.
My guess is that China sees strength in diversity. More solar yes, and more wind, more nuclear, even more hydro, to the extent that's possible. This has been what they were doing for a decade, but they're now deploying enough that it outpaces their system demand reducing the use of coal.