Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear? Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it? And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
They've got a huge amount of space, solar has a low cost and provides an additional consumer to build out yet more capacity for supplying the world.
> Wouldn't it be better to just go with nuclear
If this is legit : https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil... then they have 59 reactors right now with 37 currently in production. Wikipedia lists 62 reactors being built in the world in total, and 28 of them being in China. The amount of power those additional plants will generate will take them from third in the world to second this year (wikipedia) and in total would pass the US when built.
They're not slouching on nuclear, they're ramping up energy production at an incredible pace on a lot of fronts.
Which leads to a shrinking nuclear share in their grid. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
> how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these
Very renewable. Solar panels are mostly glass, silicon and a little bit of metal. And they last ~30 years. Wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass or similar materials. They may need replacing every ~30 years as well.
Other infrastructure would not need any significant maintenance for even longer.
These kind of power plants, apart from being renewable, have very low running costs. And that is the point.
Of course their production is very variable and therefore they cannot be used as the only power source. So e.g. nuclear power plants are still needed to back them up.
I think it is very rational to build as much power plants that are cheap to run. And back it up with nuclear or other power plants that are expensive to run but which can cover for time when the production of renewables is low.
Mono-crystalline silicon - which is now the dominant technology - is a pretty clean, but thin film PV - which is on the wane - had high heavy metal content. Good news.
I don't think the characterisation of this as waste of space is correct. There's a growing body of research suggesting that solar panels are compatible with grazing animals and farming, and the wind farms don't really stop usage of the space unless you are planning to go ballooning.
Only if you want the spicy radioisotopes. For some people that's a benefit, for others that's a problem.
Who controls the spice, controls the ~~universe~~ nuclear deterrent.
If all you care about is price, the combination of PV and batteries is already cheaper, and builds out faster.
> Isn't this a gigantic waste of space and overhead to maintain it?
No. Have you seen how big the planet is? There's enough land for about 10,000 times current global power use.
If your nation has a really small land area, e.g. Singapore, then you do actually get to care about the land use; China is not small, they don't need to care.
> And how "renewable" are the materials used to produce these?
Worst case scenario? Even if they catch fire, that turns them into metal oxides which are easier to turn back into new PV than the original rocks the same materials came out of in the first place.
Unlike coal, where the correct usage is to set them on fire and the resulting gas is really hard to capture, and nuclear, where the correct usage is to emit a lot of neutrons that make other things radioactive.
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the LCOE for advanced nuclear power was estimated at $110/MWh in 2023 and forecasted to remain the same up to 2050, while solar PV estimated to be $55/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $25/MWh in 2050. Onshore wind was $40/MWh in 2023 and expected to decline to $35/MWh in 2050 making renewables significantly cheaper in many cases. Similar trends were observed in the report for EU, China and India.”
I think the only thing that may be able to beat this is nuclear fusion, and that’s hypothetical at the moment.
And even that may be undesirable. If fusion requires huge plants, it may put power (literally and figuratively) into only a few hands.
Recycling of solar panels and glass-fiber wings is an issue, though.
The cheapest solar auction to date was $13 per MWh (middle east) - so utility solar in the best regions is already very very cheap. When you add 4hr batteries, it's still competitive with CCG gas - in the $50 range.
The cost models for first generation fusion plants show ¬$400 per MWh - it will take a while for them to get to reasonable cost levels.
Recycling of mono-crystalline solar (the dominant tech today) and modern turbine blades are solved problems.
Take too long time and cost.
I honestly perplexed by the fethism towards Nuclear Power Plants. Have you seen the delay and bloating cost of Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Vogtle?
Nuclear Power Plants are only good too spread the cost of maintaining strategic nuclear jobs and industry and some hope that nuclear space propulsion could be available later.
They'll just blame those delays and cost overruns on greens or liberals.
Better to point out that in China the nuclear targets are many years behind and continually lowered while the renewable targets are met years early and raised.
PRC Solar is cheaper (LCOE) than nuclear, more distributed, faster to build. Western PRC with good solar is mostly empty/depopulated (2/3 of PRC with 80% of solar/wind potential has like 5% of population, it's empty). Easy to install, lots of transferrable skills from general construction (vs nuclear workforce). Real estate crack down = lots of lower skilled blue collar installing solar as jobs program. Serendipitous synergy. PRC installed renewable capacity exceeds energy required to manufacture same equipment on GW basis, functionally makes production of entire sector carbon neutral/sink, as in will displace more fossil than used in production and sink after. Obviously manufacture works off grid mix, including coal, but broad point is every panel going to save more emissions vs embodied carbon payback through life cycle. There's also plans for recycling / recover materials for circular economy.
This construction of wind and solar has nothing to do with renewable, and everything to do with China's desire to get as much electricity generation as possible, which involves increasing nuclear, coal, hydro, and everything else.[1]
That wikipedia article needs to be updated for the last few years.
2025 was the first year where coal generation declined YoY. Nuclear capacity additions in 2025 were about 1% of solar additions - there is no comparison. Primarily solar and secondarily wind is the core generation strategy.
1GW of nuclear is worth about 3 to 6GW of solar if you account for the weather and nighttime. If you also account for nuclear not needing fossil backup its worth even more
But for economics. Renewables are simply the cheapest option for generation.
For reduced land use, and hence reduced impacts (overall) on the environment and agriculture, nuclear wins hands down. But decades-long lead times, radioactive waste disposal, encumbering safety regulations, water supply etc. etc. etc. are problems you don't have with renewables.
And you can buy them and use them right now, as i can go and shop some solar panels, inverters, batteries, some cables put them about anywhere and just have free electricity after the initial expense?
Plants being built these days are thermal burner reactors. They are no more "full cycle" than any other nuclear power reactors that have been built. And (like earlier reactors) reprocessing their spent fuel has no economic case.
Well if by close to nothing he means waste lasting 300 years instead of 10,000 years and by latest generation he means gen IV reactors like bn-800, superpheonix, oklo, moltex etc sure he is basically correct. Here’s a source where you can read more about breeder reactors: (which is what he is referring to)
These aren't nuclear power plants. They're designs of nuclear power plants. None have been constructed (well, aside from old plants like Superphenix, which was a failure, so much so that the French have mothballed their fast reactor program.)
Moreover, they would be considerably more expensive than existing plants (especially if fuel is to be reprocessed), so they're nonstarters.
Ah yes. “Old” plants. This plant is “old” so we could never build more like it. What an argument. And no, they would not be “considerably more expensive” because we wouldnt build a fleet of them until uranium was expensive enough that they would be cheaper. Thats why most countries have put off breeder reactor development not because they were “failures” whatever that is supposed to mean.
"Old" as in "we built it and discovered it's not wanted". The French basically gave up on the idea of fast reactors (as did the Japanese, although their fast reactor program appears to have been an excuse to obtain a stockpile of separated plutonium in case they need to make bombs). There's no market for them. The Russians have continued to try, but they're selling LWRs.
The big problem with fission is that it's too expensive. Fast reactors make that main problem worse. There is no economic margin to do fancy (and expensive) things to try to address the lesser issue of nuclear waste.
In an economic sense, when compared to burner reactors, this is correct. As the rise of wind and solar has shown however, political will and popularity matter more than pure economics. Burner reactors are more of a 22nd century technology, assuming the grid storage problem doesn’t get solved by then and we just go full renewable on economics. But nothing is set in stone
What nonsense. What solar and wind have shown is the overwhelming importance of economics. They are dominating now because they have become cheap, not because of some sort of "triumph of the will". And they have become cheap because they are inherently the kind of technologies that has good experience curves. Unlike nuclear.
Nonsense? Why was US nuclear built at all in the 60’s and 70’s? Or in France? Because it was cheaper? No. It was built because people thought it was a good idea. The same is true for intermittents today. They are popular with a section of the population so they get the funding. And no, nuclear has fantastic experience curves. Look at any country building lots of reactors and the n-th of a kind is cheap. Building out nuclear and maintaining industry experience works to keep costs low.
They are uninhabited by humans currently. They are not uninhabitable as shown by animals and plants living there. And they can also not be called "big parts of the earth" by any stretch of those words.
Especially Fukushima is more of a political issue than a safety one.
Proven Uranium reserves with breeder reactors will last 10,000 years. With a modest increase in the price of Uranium, extraction from sea water becomes viable and unlocks tens of millions of years of supply. Some geologiats have argued that rock weathering will replenish sea water Uranium concentrations faster than we would extract it making the supply last longer than the expected age of the Earth.
China is has most of its population further south than either USA or Europe. Solar makes much more sense there than in those locations.
Furthermore, by stimulating production of solar and wind related products with domestic consumption, the Chinese state has effectively captured absolute majority share of production across the entire supply chain. This is incredibly useful, when developed countries roll out subsidies for clean power.
Since there are no manufacturers that can match those in China in both price and volume. The bulk of subsidies is used to buy Chinese produced equipment.
At the same time, China is also investing in nuclear technology, and deploying far faster than anywhere in the world.
