This advocates for a far inferior technology. It’s like advocating for dial up internet in the age of fiber and 5G.
It takes roughly 400kWh of energy to make a 1 sq-mtr of solar panels. And one can hope to get, at best 15x that over its life. And that’s being generous, without accounting for batteries to stabilize the grid at night. For reference, oil and gas return anywhere between 50-80x for the energy spent in drilling and distilling them.
Nuclear (boiling water or pressure water reactors) yield about 150-200x and are amazing as base loads. Next generation molten salt reactors (thorium based) yield over 1000x the energy spent in mining, refining, and bringing to critical. These reactors also burn about 98% of all fissile material, can consume nuclear waste, and yield isotopes for medical purposes. They work at atmospheric pressure(no risk of blowing up), and grid follow well as they work at 550degC which is great for energy conversion.
China achieved thorium reactor criticality in 2023 and is pouring large sums of money to scale this up. Whereas, we’re being primitive here despite creating the technology in Oak Ridge National Labs in the 80s.
Solar is a joke, and while it works for residential, I don’t understand how we assume it be the solution for true nation building.
China literally is making energy so cheap, farmers are installing air-conditioning for pig sheds to keep their bacons cool during the summer. Needless to say, cheap energy will power the next AI boom, and lift the poor and middle class up. And we’re toying with dumb tech like cavemen here.
Not sure where you're getting "at best 15x", the best panels from 2013 were found to have a 30x EROI: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
And from a more recent study:
"This work has shown that the EROI of fossil fuels drops considerably when moving from a final stage (approximately 8.5) to a useful stage analysis (approximately 3.5). The low overall EROI value at the useful stage, however, hides large differences across fossil fuel groups and end uses, with average useful stage energy returns being much higher for heating compared with mechanical end uses. In addition, we find that fossil fuel useful-stage energy returns have remained fairly constant on average over time (except for fossil gas) and may even have slightly increased. Such findings contradict the conventional narrative according to which fossil fuels present very high, although rapidly decreasing, energy returns.
Next, we find that the EROI equivalent value for which electricity-yielding renewable energy systems deliver the same net useful energy as fossil fuels is as low as 4.6, due to the substantially higher final-to-useful efficiency of electricity compared to those of fossil fuel-based energy carriers. This value is, however, highly variable across the fossil fuels and end uses considered. We also find that most literature-sourced EROI values for electricity-yielding renewable energy technologies are higher than the EROI equivalent we have calculated, even when adjusting the values for the implications of intermittency using a wide range of energy transition scenarios. This result suggests that renewable energy may deliver more net useful energy than their fossil fuel counterparts for the same amount of final energy invested."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
EROI only has to be greater than one for the number to rapidly lose its meaning relative to every other input (and externality) of a given energy technology. It makes no sense to focus on it.
> cheap energy is will power the next AI boom
This is already happening, that and the crypto boom from a few years ago.
> and lift the poor and middle class up
But this is not happening; the ones doing AI stuff, crypto stuff, energy stuff have no interest in lifting any classes up. Energy prices are not going down, because demand is going up alongside supply, to the point where in some places the energy grid can't keep up. At-home solar and EVs are putting strain on the residential grids, even the newly built ones that have been reinforced 4x compared to the power grid of 10, 20 years ago.
Thorium reactors will cost billions and decades to build, even if you can find a location, get past the legal hurdles, the societal outrage, NIMBYism, etc. Meanwhile, you can get solar panels from your local DIY store, or order a pallet of them off the internet for cheap. Anyone with roof or field space can build themselves a solar farm, but nuclear or thorium reactors are huge, nationwide and political investments.
Modern nuclear reactors used to be huge, but that’s outdated now. The revolution in small modular reactors promises to change all that.
In capitalism, we innovate for more profit. We don’t innovate to get random people wealthy.
High EROI = high profit for investors
Return on energy is different from cost, and it's strange that you're ignoring that. When you look at the levelized cost of energy, solar and onshore wind win: On a per-kWh basis, they produce the cheapest energy around. Gas combined cycle plants are close, but they have pollution and CO2 drawbacks.
LCOE doesn't capture everything you want, but when your grid mix is low on solar, it's the most relevant metric. When we get 15x return on energy and the energy we produce is cheap, you can ... use 1/15th of that energy to make more solar panels. And we're getting better at producing them by the year: Energy input is down and efficiency is up.
Nuclear is about 3x as expensive per kWh generated and it's not as dispatchable. Fossil fuels have this annoying problem of emitting co2and contributing a lot to climate change. That doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to find ways to drive the cost of nuclear down - we should! - but from the perspective of "What generation should I install tomorrow?", solar and wind, augmented with a bit of storage, are really impressive: They're the fastest to bring online and provide the cheapest energy. The cost to them is you probably have to pay your gas plant operators a higher capacity fee for rare occasions, but that's ok. In a region like mine (PJM - pennsylvania, new jersey, virginia, ohio, etc.), they still make a profit while burning less gas, and consumer energy cost drops.
It seems weird to get all religious about technology choices when they each have advantages and disadvantages and combine pretty well to even out those differences. It would be expensive to be 100% solar+wind+storage because of the overprovisioning needed. But a mix instead of running 100% fossil (or 100% nuclear) would drop your costs considerably and be faster to build out.
From a pure physics and first principles perspective, a higher EROI implies higher scalability and lower costs.
Nuclear today has high costs associated to it due to uncertainty in permitting, high upfront costs due to red-tape, annd archaic regulations that stifle any innovation. These make risk management prohibitively expensive as is the cost of insuring them. If the catastrophic rate of failure and associated deaths are far far smaller than what’s generally accepted in society(think fatalities due to vehicle accidents), then we must work to removing the red-tape to ease construction of these. They’re also far more green to operate.
This way, we can keep solar for residential, and for industries to offset their own use(think data centers investing in their own energy supply instead of paying others. Think on-premise vs off-premise).
Let's start with privatizing the risk of it going kaboom. Why do we need red tape that pushes the cleanup costs onto taxpayer shoulders? It's so safe!
Sophisticated private insurers being willing to shoulder the full financial downside of nuclear power plants going fukushima (not < 1% as it is now!) will give everybody confidence that they're not just pushing propaganda exaggerating how safe they are to an unsophisticated public.
Assuming you are correct, there will be less red tape, the sophisticated insurers will happily take on the additional risks and unsophisticated taxpayers dont have to worry about being on the hook for one of those ~$800 billion Fukushima style cleanup events.
I wont hold my breath though.... after all, they know the nuclear industry would stop existing if insurance were actually priced according to the risk even if the consumers of their expensive public relations campaigns dont.
1. If something's expensive enough, that turns into manpower and then energy use as you look at the whole supply chain.
2. The ratio doesn't really matter once it hits double digits. If something outputs 100 energy units, the difference between it costing 10 energy units to build versus costing .01 energy units to build isn't a game changer. The important number is that almost all the energy it makes is "profit". And if you can make a solar panel output a few percent more energy, that matters more than getting the energy cost to 0 and having an infinite ratio would matter. All else equal, a solar panel that costs 4kWh to make and has a 1000x return is worse than a solar panel that costs 400kWh to make and has a 15x return.
While that may be true - I can invest in home solar and have zero or near zero electricity costs at reasonable prices with a 5 to 7 year payback period. Near me solar farms run at a profit here in England, and yet I don't believe any nuclear power plant has run at a profit without government assistance, or subsidies, and none are yet expected to fund their own decommissioning and clean up - society will bear these costs.
Large scale solar are actually large scale gas plants.
Since there is no way to store electricity large scale and solar energy is unreliable then they depend on gas turbines to work.
Not entirely. California now handles its peak using solar+storage quite effectively.
https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-solar-storage-spring-2025/
It's not entirely 1:1. CA has about 20GW of solar production, and the solar+storage together completely replace about 5GW of fossil capacity.
(But don't discount wind. Wind+solar combine pretty well, and if you throw that in, you'll see that CA is actually replacing about 10GW of fossil capacity with solar+storage+wind. That's _capacity_, not production, so that's 8GW of avoided plant construction.)
We still need more progress in storage, for sure, but the trajectory has been good so far. Storage prices have continued to drop and given the lag of construction times, we should expect online storage to continue to improve for at least several years. Another bit of battery coming online should let CA take that from 5 to 7GW of replaced peak capacity from solar+storage.
Exactly my point. Solar and Wind being intermittent require additional expense of grid storage which other forms of energy do not need.
So to scale, for each GW of solar, you’ll need a GW of storage plus the energy reserve to take through the night. Can’t rely on wind here as that’s also intermittent.
And grid storage is energy intensive and sets up twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage. Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage. Because, with intermittent sources pricing has to be more dynamic.
And why is dynamic pricing a bad thing? It aligns the incentives well.
Totally. Our local electric supplier just introduced it as an option and I love it - admitting that none of us here are normal people, I reprogrammed my thermostats to be a degree warmer during peak times, shifted when we run dishes and laundry, and I run some of the compute load off of UPS. (And I have a little solar). I'm saving about $30/month on my power bill with it. It's cool.
> twisted incentives for those playing to get rich with energy arbitrage
You're saying energy arbitrage doesn't happen right now?
> Think solar farm generators owning their own grid storage and reducing solar output to sell at higher $ from storage
If enough generators do that they'll drive down the price of power at night and increase the price of power in the daytime. This will incentivize the opposite behavior.
Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that, please let people know, but with the current defunding everything mindset and general gridlock and one bill a year passed I think solar will be much cheaper by the time you even start breaking the ground on a thorium reactor.
>Nuclear seems to only work if nation-states build and operate it directly - no private firm can build them profitably and on time.
Nation states are not able to run the plants profitably either, they just don't run out of money.
Look at France, the US, UK, Germany and Japan for example. They all have immense costs related to nuclear power that is not covered by the sale of nuclear electricity.
Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you. Same reason public transit and police run at a loss, in theory.
>Yeah, but if your intent is to support industry by having cheap energy costs that works out for you
Short-term perhaps, but pretending that something expensive is cheap doesn't really work in the long run.
Investments are supposed to be an initial cost upfront that pays off later. Like building roads, bridges and such. For energy, an investment would be to take the cost of a renewable infrastructure, energy storage, solar roofs and such. Once they are in place they have minimal costs and give extremely cheap and reliable energy (reliable because of the distribution and redundancy).
Nuclear is kind of the opposite, you get the payoff upfront but have to pay an unknown amount basically forever afterwards. This cost eventually catches up to you.
France today is in a manner of speaking still paying for electricity they consumed in the 80s and 90s by bailing out EDF. Yet the common opinion still seems to be that they have "cheap electricity".
I think France has the most expensive energy infrastructure in Europe, and it will sooner or later become impossible to pretend otherwise.
> If you can get the us federal government to be functional again or have a path to doing that
Impossible.
Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
The model of having professional class of administrators and politicians running the country as part of a massive bureaucracy is one that can't work as it is unmanageable and full of conflicts of interests, moral hazards, political market failures and so on and so forth.
They carry on just through inertia at this point. Their one talent is creating a image of control and stability without actually providing any.
If you ever worked in a large publicly traded corporation and realized just how dysfunctional they are as a organization, multiply that a thousandfold and you have modern western governments.
Nuclear is expensive and doesn't work because there are a lot of people in power and next to power that don't want it to work.
> Federal government in US is failing along with the rest of large scale western style governments. They are too big, cost too much, and have too many fundamental structural deficiencies.
How do you see those governments failing, and when?
When sorting countries by tax burden (as a percentage of GDP), then you will find that there are tons of extremely livable countries at the top (wealthy European nations), while basically everything under ~10% GDP taxation is a 3rd world disaster.
How big of a GDP percentage would you propose can a government take at most and not "invariably fall apart"?
There are also a lot of people on the ground that don't want it to work, or will protest it, and that's where state power seems to work well to cut through opposition and just build things. Certainly a lot of tradeoffs are made to allow that but the Chinese government seems very good at building.
I'm not sure if it's the model or the particular culture working though - aren't there also a lot of party bureaucrats over there? So the core is authority or agency directed at the center of it, I think.
So get government out of the space here. Keep essential regulations for ensuring safety and so that insurance companies can cover liabilities. Let the free market play it out.
If the profit incentives are there(which there are as higher EROI = lowest cost per kWh), then it is a race to who can provide the product(energy) at the lowest cost more reliably.
Government unfortunately has a monopoly here as traditional reactors had proliferations concerns, needed much large capital, and political will. But if reactors can be modular and costs low that a city could afford it, then you can also have decentralized reactors just like you have with solar.
Like I said, if you have some pathway to a functional government (either to cut regulations sufficiently or to build it, I don't think either is much simpler) then you should get on that part first. But I'm not holding out much hope. We can barely reduce regulations to build houses, and voters like houses. You'll have environmental protests a plenty for city scale small reactors if they're in anyone's "backyard" at all
China seems to be taking the joke rather seriously [1]
> The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
So they took all the solar installed in the USA since forever, and build it in a year. Twice.
That being said, they're _also_ building everything else:
* PWR nuclear [2] (sadly, they managed to make EPR work faster than the E in EPR, but we're getting there.) Here market and investment and regulation are the hitters. "Fusion nuclear" will always be 50 years away ; until we get SMRs, "Fission nuclear" will always be a couple of years late and a few millions over budget.
* indeed, Thorium nuclear [3] (although it's far from powering any air-conditionner in any pig shed any time soon)
* and looooooots of coal [4]
So basically, China has understood that the answer to "what kind of electricity source should we build ?" is "YES".
The faster they replace "new coal" by "new anything else", the better we are as as species, since they're the world factory - so the lifecycle of _everything_ improve when they improve their grid.
Of course, here's to hoping they're not lying they way off...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/01/1115957/old-new-...
[4] https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...
I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown, having also built complete ghost cities, so some of these investments may not look very smart in just a few years. Don’t confuse investment with malinvestment, in other words. Throwing money at everything, much in direct opposition to market forces, has never really been shown to be a winning strategy.
Most of those "ghost cities" got populated in "just a few years", so much so that wiki had to change Chinese Ghost City entry into "Underoccupied Developements". And what is the scale of PRC "malinvestment", quantify or approximate it. Here's a hint, PRC RE+construction as % of GDP = ~15%, about OECD average. PRC just very good at building and gets much more from it, even if some sits idle first or ultimately gets wasted. AKA PRC barely throws more money that OECD in RE sector, they certainly have the option of throwing less money, but that only makes them more efficient relative to rest.
Entire construction + downstream industries is 30%, most of 15% redirected to renewable row out where solar already has better ROI than importing oil, aka, until PRC displaces another 10m barrels per day via renewables, or hits US per capita energy use (double current), any domestic power investment is positive. Throwing money at increasing cheaper power that makes manipulating atoms in every down stream sector is directly what market forces is ALWAYS driving towards. Increasing energy per capita is the only proven winning civilzational development strategy.
Don't confuse some malinvestments for retarded existential PRC collapse narrative. For reference US spending 18% GDP on health care, i.e. 2x OECD average of 9% is single handly more inefficient than likely ALL Chinese policies can misallocate, i.e. that 9% of excess US health spending that gets wasted by scribes can build entire PRC HSR network in like 5 months.
Housing projects are handled by local governments in China, not the central government. What you're saying is as absurd as saying Detroit going bankrupt is hurting the credibility of Uncle Sam.
> I’d also point out that China is teetering on the edge of a financial meltdown
This and the "OMG demographic collapse" sound like serious copium to me at this point.
I really don't know how to assess China's economic or financial state.
I vividly remember hearing about how the housing bubble was going to break any time soon... a decade ago ?
And then how they would never survive Covid-19. Or the Trump tarrifs, etc...
To be clear, I'm not saying they're invincible or anything - maybe the economy _did_ collapse, but not uniformly, and maybe the central government is able to bail out the economy more efficiently than western economies, and maybe they're just lying their way off, etc...
But so far I have the same feelings about rumors on china's economical death as on Russian ones - metaphorically, I'll believe it when I see the corpse, and when its head has been chopped off for safety ;)
I think you have misunderstood energy yield expressed as a multiple of energy input as a fundamental measurement of the viability of any energy technology.
If you run scenarios, you’ll find that this number is entirely irrelevant. Instead, try considering the availability and required quantities of raw materials and inputs like silver, indium, land, and of course money which is the best proxy for measuring how much of the world economy would be required for building out any technology.
You seem to be ignoring the most important factor, which is cost.
You also only need to buy the panel once. Fuel is free
China is literally making energy that cheap using solar. They add about an entire United Kingdom's worth of solar energy every year (about 270 TWh), that's 100x(!) of what they add in nuclear capacity (which is almost nothing). Even in China solar and renewables are rendering the nuclear sector obsolete. (afaik they're canceling about a third or half of running projects)
And paraphrasing Bruno Maçães from his latest book, far from a caveman technology one of the most transformative aspects of solar energy is that it will move the world from a logic of energy stocks to a logic of energy flows. Decentralized, dynamic, expandable and moveable, a solar network is to the legacy energy grid what the internet is to the TV broadcasting center. It's to move from a society of matter to a society of energy.
To make that philosophical point practical, Pakistan last year added a third of its entire consumption in solar energy. Significant parts of the population are now grid independent. In a country where natural disasters and central mismanagement produced a fragile system, you might soon have one of the most robust, distributed and deterritorialized energy systems.