Nuclear is usually late and over-budget

I found this chart in an article by Michael Barnard on CleanTechnica

The likelihood of the enormous capacities of wind and solar successfully getting built on time [in China], on budget and hitting benefits targets is immensely higher than that of this [Chinese] nuclear build out. That’s a key learning of Professor Bent Flyvbjerg and team from their global dataset of megaprojects, something that Flyvbjerg has been building since the late 1990s and is now over 16,000 strong, with over 150 nuclear generation projects.

Nuclear reactors have lots of risks that, if they trigger, cause very significant time and budget overruns. Wind and solar have very few risks that cause significant time and budget overruns if they occur. The results are clear in the data. If you want to hit targets and achieve benefits, build wind and solar. China is doing that incredibly well.

China added 274 GW of wind and solar capacity to their grid in 2023. They are on track to build a lot more than that for each of the next seven years. The chart at the top of this article is just going to get worse and worse for nuclear as its line gets flatter and flatter to allow wind, solar and water generation additions to fit into it vertically.

While China has a lot of nuclear in construction and a bunch more approved, that’s not the takeaway that other jurisdictions should learn from its energy efforts. If anything, there are three lessons: 

One, that wind and solar are the right choice for the vast majority of jurisdictions. 

Two, that China’s failures to stick to a single proven design for nuclear and build lots of it are a warning related to national and regional nuclear programs. 

Three, that unless a country is big enough and rich enough to build dozens of identical reactors as well as to achieve the rest of the conditions of success, or is able to join a bunch of other countries to achieve critical mass with a guarantee of singularity of design and the rest of the success criteria, nuclear shouldn’t be on the energy policy agenda.

[You can read the whole article here]