China has just announced its plan to build another eight nuclear reactors to add to its growing fleet. The cost of building a nuclear power plant in China (and likewise, in South Korea) is dramatically cheaper than building them in the USA. It’s a cop-out to say that that’s because the USA’s nuclear plants are safer and thus more costly.
For almost fifty years the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has hamstrung nuclear power development in myriad ways
, not least by stubbornly clinging to unscientific concepts like LNT (the Linear Non-Threshold theory—though to call it a theory is a stretch, since there’s so much evidence that it’s nonsense) and ALARA (As Low As Reasonably Achievable—“reasonably” being the operative problematic word that’s driven nuclear power plant prices higher and higher). The current administration has finally started to dismantle some of the NRC’s hurdles, yet that regulator still is resisting efforts to abandon those impediments to low-priced nuclear power.
Why can China and South Korea build reactors so much cheaper than the USA? Korea built four reactors in the UAE and has built many at home. Let’s compare costs:
China’s recently announced plan to build eight reactors for $25 billion dollars, with a total generating capacity of a little over nine gigawatts. Cost: $2.77/watt.
South Korea builds its APR1400 reactors for $2.20-2.80/watt when they build them at home.
The Vogtle power plant’s two reactors (similar to the Korean APR reactors) cost about $15.70/watt by the time they were up and running.
Anti-nuclear voices try to convince the public that nuclear power is just too expensive, citing projects like Vogtle or some of the EPR projects in Europe. But it’s clear that nuclear power plants can be built very economically. The problem is mainly political. Those political winds are changing in the USA, but the NRC is having to be dragged kicking and screaming into letting go of pseudoscientific nonsense like LNT. Hopefully reason will soon prevail.
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