Nope. Investment has dried up in nuclear exactly because the ROI is garbage compared to the trend lines in renewables + storage + gas turbine plants. A lot of posters here have a sort of smugness about being fans of nuclear power, blaming it's decline purely on "irrational" fears. They blithely ignore that even in authoritarian states where there's no meaningful political opposition to nuclear projects, we see the same declining interest. It just takes too much capital too long vs alternatives now. Absent a global carbon tariff nuclear will likely never again be competitive with gas supplementing renewables.
Gas is on the way out as well. Renewables undercut them routinely. Gas plants are expensive to operate and in a peaker plant role they have to compete with cheap battery which means they are not running most of the time and only when all else has failed. And as we saw in Texas, that's not a good plan either when gas supplies run tight.
E.g. the Australians vastly reduced their need for gas plants just by installing a few hundred MW of battery and saved a lot of cash in the process. ROI on those batteries has been quite high very early on. Not having turn on their peaker plants is a big deal.
Really? China has been building plants quite steadfastly. Fukushima seemed to have put the breaks on that but still, there are plants being built. Yet Western companies, like Areva, seemed to have completely lost their game in making the plants and nobody's willing to buy them from China or Russia. And sure, there's a high capital cost but putting the solar panels or wind turbines to match the capacity of one modern nuclear plant isn't exactly cheap either.
Buying solar or wind gets you about 3x the capacity for the same price in about 6-12 months. It's a lot cheaper and a lot less risk. And that's excluding operational cost. If you want capacity on a budget in a hurry, wind is your best bet right now. Nuclear is for the opposite scenario where you have decades time and are not in a hurry to get capacity online and don't mind paying an order of magnitude more.
The Chinese hedged their bets a few decades ago and wind + solar won there as well. China is breaking records in terms of growth of their renewable capacity and are a key technology supplier in that space and also a big part of why it got so cheap.
Yeah, it's this, combined with how cheap and effective gas turbines are, co2 be damned. It's really hard to argue for several billion dollars on a 10 year min delay until revenue vs renewables plus gas that builds out in under a year and is net positive ROI within a shockingly short time.
Even though I'm generally pro nuclear, I've come to the conclusion that absent some innovation that changes the cost structure, it's an increasingly dead option. I was hopeful NuScale's approach would do that, but it's pretty clear now they're missing their needed numbers.
