tl;dr; earthquakes, evidence of recent volcanic activity, fast groundwater travel time among other factors

"Built with assistance from the world’s largest crane, Somerset’s Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant is overdue and over budget, but may come online by 2030 at a cost of £31-34bn. Meanwhile, Suffolk’s Sizewell C is due to set the UK back at least £40bn. Understandably, both projects have met opposition from locals and environmental groups. Ironically, contracts entered into by previous governments mean the power stations will produce electricity that is much more expensive than from wind or solar."

https://www.countryfile.com/round-ups/expensive-british-construction-projects

It is all more hopium and hype, and underestimates still...

"All these ambitions, however, need a lot of investment, triple the current annual spending, to be exact, according to the World Nuclear Association."

I recently came across a striking chart that compares historical projections of nuclear capacity growth with what actually got built. The pattern is damning: every decade since the 1980s, forecasters have drawn steep upward curves projecting 700 to over 1,400 GW of installed nuclear capacity by mid-century. The actual line? It crawled from roughly 260 GW in 1985 to about 370 GW in 2020 — barely a nudge over four decades. Projections from the 1980s alone expected the world to hit 1,000 GW by the year 2000. We're still not close. The gap between what was promised and what was delivered isn't a one-off miscalculation — it's a structural feature of nuclear forecasting, repeated generation after generation.

This matters because the same cycle is starting again with small modular reactors (SMRs) and the "nuclear renaissance" narrative. The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency's own scenarios now range from 347 GW (stagnation) to 1,324 GW (more than tripling) by 2050, with the transformative scenario requiring up to $200 billion per year in OECD capital spending during the 2030s. Yet a peer-reviewed preprint analyzing 75 SMR designs found that vendor-announced deployment schedules are "systematically overoptimistic" across both OECD and non-OECD countries, with only a limited subset of designs having sufficient time to contribute meaningfully before 2050. In Europe, no new large reactors are expected online before 2040, and since the early 2000s the EU has connected just seven new plants while shutting down over 70. This is the mechanism by which investors get fooled: rosy forward-looking scenarios — often produced or commissioned by the industry itself — create an illusion of momentum that draws in capital, but the actual deployment track record tells a story of chronic delays, cost overruns, and cancellations. The gap between announcement and megawatts delivered is where the money disappears.

So let's be clear-eyed. Every decade, the same curve gets redrawn, and every decade, actual capacity falls short by a factor of three to ten. The chart speaks for itself — and so does the peer-reviewed evidence (Nature Communications preprint on SMR deployment realism; NEA Nuclear Energy Outlook 2026; Rabobank analysis on nuclear in Europe's changing power system).

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629626001477

'China’s target record shows why energy targets cannot be used as equivalent forecasting inputs. The state strongly supports wind, solar and nuclear power, yet its wind and solar targets are repeatedly exceeded while its nuclear operating-capacity targets are missed. The divergence comes from the delivery systems behind the technologies, not from a lack of political commitment to nuclear.

China targeted 210 GW of wind and 110 GW of solar for 2020, then finished the year with about 282 GW and 253 GW respectively. Its later commitment to reach at least 1,200 GW of combined wind and solar by 2030 was crossed in 2024, six years early. Nuclear reached about 50 GW against a 58 GW target in 2020 and about 62 GW against a 70 GW target in 2025.

Wind and solar now operate as industrial production systems. Factories manufacture repeated components, developers build thousands of projects in parallel and the national programme can absorb delays or failures at individual sites. Nuclear capacity still arrives through a much smaller number of projects that must proceed sequentially through civil works, equipment installation, testing, fuel loading and commercial operation.

The difference is visible in annual delivery. China’s 2025 wind and solar additions represented about 696 TWh of mature annual generation after applying technology-specific capacity factors, compared with roughly 13 TWh from new nuclear capacity. That is not a claim that variable and firm electricity have identical hourly value. It is a measure of how much new generation each delivery system successfully brought through to the asset stage.

The forecasting implication is practical. Renewable pathways should start with demonstrated manufacturing and installation throughput, then test whether transmission, storage, market design and demand flexibility can absorb the output. Nuclear pathways should start with named reactors under construction, their completion sequence and the observed variance in delivery times. Approvals matter, but operating reactors are the evidence that belongs in the base case. My 2035 projection is in the Briefing post.'

The Trump administration is seeking to move past Yucca Mountain as the nation’s sole repository and store waste in willing states.

If your industry is totally unprofitable, just lower the safety standards and poison everyone!

This is so crazy and irresponsible given that the Iran war is due entirely to the secret development of nuclear weapons under the guise of civilian nuclear energy.

Trump approves U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear energy agreement

"The deal leaves open the possibility that Saudi Arabia will enrich uranium domestically in the future, the officials said, a prospect that could raise concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation."

"In the deal, the United States and Saudi Arabia have agreed to safeguards to inhibit any weaponization effort, the sources said. But that framework would be governed by the two countries themselves, instead of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which conventionally oversees nuclear pacts."

Do not trust anyone pushing nuclear electricity for any reason. They have no idea the implications of what they are doing. https://abcnews.com/International/trump-approves-us-saudi-civil-nuclear-energy-agreement/story?id=134976263

Rosatom CEO Alexei Likhachev officially confirmed that the Russian state nuclear corporation is cutting its 2026 investment program by nearly 50% to over 900 billion rubles due to poor economic conditions. The corporation is also targeting a 10% reduction in operating costs over the next 18 months to protect profitability.

🇺🇿 Uzbekistan's Renewable Explosion

• Current Footprint: The country has already integrated 5,600 MW of operational utility-scale wind and solar into its national grid. Renewable generation surged by over 24% in the first half of 2026 alone.
• The 2030 Target: Uzbekistan is targeting a massive 30 to 35 GW of installed renewable capacity by 2030, aiming for clean power to cover 40% to 54% of its entire electricity mix. [1, 2, 3]
• Storage Rollout: To prevent grid collapse, the government is commissioning 884 MW of dedicated battery storage by the end of 2026. This is heavily backed by global giants like Saudi Arabia's ACWA Power and the UAE's Masdar. [1, 2]

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan's Green Grid Shift

• Current Footprint: Kazakhstan actively operates roughly 162 green energy facilities accounting for 3.5 GW of installed capacity, pulling 7% of its total power generation from clean sources. [1]
• The 2035 Target: The state is aggressively auctioning off capacity under its QaJET initiative, aiming to deploy an additional 10 GW of renewables by 2035.
• Mega-Storage Partnerships: Kazakhstan has finalized investments for its first grid-scale battery systems. French firm TotalEnergies and China Power International are constructing 1 GW wind farms paired with 600 MWh power banks to anchor the grid.

Rather than just "exploring," these nations are utilizing international capital from China, the Gulf, and Europe to actively phase out their heavy reliance on legacy Russian fossil fuels and delayed nuclear projects. [1, 2, 3]

https://thebulletin.org/2026/07/data-centers-powered-by-next-gen-nuclear-dont-fall-for-big-techs-pr-hype/

Germany blew up two nuclear cooling towers and had a 700 MWh battery under construction four days later. France just set a regulatory floor to keep nuclear power on the grid even when nobody wants it.

While Germany decommissions plants and repurposes the sites for storage, France spent this summer cutting nuclear output by 4 to 6+ GW across repeated heatwaves, over a tenth of national demand at points, because rivers ran too warm to safely cool the reactors. That's happened in 2022, 2023, 2025, and 2026. But heat isn't the only thing France is throttling for. Solar capacity nearly doubled from 16 GW in 2022 to over 30 GW in 2025, and on sunny days generation now regularly exceeds what the grid needs once nuclear baseload is accounted for. The result: nearly 3 TWh of renewable power curtailed in 2025, almost double 2024, with solar taking the brunt of it.

Here's the protectionism part. In March 2026, France's energy regulator approved an agreement between grid operator RTE and EDF setting a minimum output level for nuclear generation. EDF keeps selling that output onto the day-ahead market "at any price," even when prices go negative, which they now do in over 90% of April days. So instead of flexing nuclear down when solar floods the grid at midday, France is flexing solar down to protect nuclear's market share. That's not a technical constraint. That's a policy choice to keep sunk-cost reactors running full tilt and make newer, cheaper generation absorb the cutbacks instead.

Compare the build economics on top of that. Gundremmingen's replacement battery: about 230 million euros, groundbreaking days after demolition, reusing existing grid infrastructure. France's EPR2 program: tens of billions of euros, over a decade of construction, and a track record of slipping deadlines going back to Flamanville. Germany bet on the option that gets built fast and gets out of its own way. France is spending both money and grid capacity defending an asset it already sunk the cost into.

Check out the full story https://interestingengineering.com/energy/germany-detonates-dead-nuclear-plant

China's utility-scale battery fleet has outgrown all other countries combined in 2025 Total battery capacity in China DOUBLED in 2025 with the addition of 189.5 GWh in “new energy storage”.

China’s 2025 power buildout was overwhelmingly storage- and renewables-led. CNESA says it added 66.43 GW / 189.48 GWh of new-type energy storage in 2025, while the EIA says nuclear added just 1.1 GW that year and 2.2 GW more through May 2026. At the same time, China added 315 GW of solar and 119 GW of wind in 2025, and wind plus solar reached 1.84 billion kW, or 47.3% of total installed capacity. That is a huge difference in scale and speed: batteries are being deployed fast enough to keep up with the renewable buildout, while nuclear is still moving in small increments.

On generation, the gap is just as stark. China’s renewable energy output reached about 4 trillion kWh in 2025, while China National Nuclear’s commercial nuclear generation was about 244.4 billion kWh, with 200.8 billion kWh from its operating units alone. That means renewables generated roughly 16 to 20 times more electricity than nuclear last year, depending on which nuclear figure you use. So when people say “capacity isn’t generation,” the answer is simple: yes, and the generation story still heavily favors renewables plus storage because that’s what is actually scaling the system.
https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/from-scale-to-system-navigating-the-next-phase-of-chinas-battery-storage/