Nuclear’s Costly Comeback Meets Harsh Market Reality

By Leon Stille - Nov 21, 2025, 3:00 PM CST

• Nuclear power’s “cheap, clean, and secure” promise is breaking down.
• Small modular reactors (SMRs) remain largely theoretical, with the only advanced U.S. project cancelled over high costs.
• Renewables and storage now dominate energy economics, offering faster build times, flexibility, and lower prices.

I’ve followed the promise of small modular reactors (SMRs) and next-generation nuclear in several of my earlier pieces on OilPrice. The argument is familiar: nuclear provides low-carbon baseload, ensures energy security, and will one day deliver affordable, clean power. It sounds persuasive, until you look at the numbers. New nuclear remains slow, expensive, and deeply reliant on state support. In today’s European power markets, where renewables are already driving prices to record lows or even negative territory, the idea that nuclear can deliver “cheap and secure” power no longer holds up.

Expensive power disguised as security

Let’s start with the UK. Hinkley Point C, the flagship of the country’s nuclear revival, was only made possible through a 35-year Contract for Difference guaranteeing a strike price of £92.50 per MWh (in 2012 money). That’s roughly double the current wholesale market price, indexed to inflation, and fully guaranteed by taxpayers. It isn’t market competitiveness, it’s a subsidy designed to get the project financed.

Sizewell C will take the same path under a Regulated Asset Base model, transferring part of the construction risk directly to consumers through levies on electricity bills long before a single watt is produced. When “cheap” energy requires that level of public underwriting, something is fundamentally off.

A track record written in red ink

This pattern isn’t unique to Britain. France’s Flamanville reactor, long touted as the EPR showpiece, is over a decade late and has quadrupled in cost to more than €13 billion. Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 only began commercial operations after 17 years of delays and legal disputes. In the United States, Vogtle 3 and 4 finally came online after 15 years and around $36 billion in total costs, double initial projections, with ratepayers footing much of the bill through regulated recovery.

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The nuclear industry’s narrative of reliability is at odds with its delivery record. Projects start with optimism and end with budget blowouts, political fallout, and consumer bailouts.

The SMR Illusion

Advocates often pivot to SMRs as the saviour, the “Tesla moment” for nuclear. I explored that hype in an earlier OilPrice article, noting that SMRs were being promoted as modular, factory-built, and inherently cheaper. Yet so far, reality looks familiar.

The most advanced U.S. SMR project, NuScale’s Carbon Free Power Project in Idaho, was cancelled in 2023 after projected costs rose to $89 per MWh, far above renewables and storage. Other designs remain on paper, heavily dependent on public subsidies or guaranteed offtake. The promise of small reactors may eventually prove out, but at the moment, SMRs are an idea with a press office, not a business case.

The market reality has shifted

Europe’s electricity markets tell the other half of the story. In 2024, countries like Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands each recorded more than 450 hours of negative day-ahead prices. France saw nearly 360. Across the EU, negative or ultra-low price hours exceeded 9,000 in total.

For inflexible, capital-intensive baseload assets like nuclear, that’s disastrous. These plants can’t ramp down profitably when prices collapse. Their economics depend on constant, high utilization, and that world is disappearing. The more renewables come online, the more volatile the price pattern becomes, with long stretches of near-zero wholesale power. Nuclear simply doesn’t fit this market geometry.

Renewables and storage are doing what nuclear can’t

The contrast is striking. Renewables can be deployed modularly, financed privately, and built within 18–36 months. Utility-scale batteries, once dismissed as expensive, are now scaling at record speed. Europe installed nearly 22 GWh of new storage capacity in 2024, bringing total installed capacity above 60 GWh. Italy’s first grid-scale auction secured 10 GWh of storage at competitive prices, no decade-long delays, no multi-billion-euro risk exposure.

Each incremental gigawatt of storage turns volatile wind and solar into a more stable, dispatchable asset. In that environment, nuclear’s supposed advantage of “firm capacity” starts to look less like a virtue and more like an anchor.

Security means flexibility, not monoliths

Nuclear advocates still frame the argument in security terms, stable, domestic generation insulated from fossil-fuel geopolitics. But in modern energy systems, security no longer means “always-on baseload.” It means adaptability, diversification, and resilience.

A network built from distributed solar, wind, storage, and demand-side flexibility is inherently harder to disrupt. It can absorb shocks, balance local fluctuations, and restart quickly after failures. A multi-billion-euro single-site nuclear facility, by contrast, is a high-value target for cost escalation, technical failure, or even physical risk.

Energy security in the 2020s is about systems thinking, not megaproject symbolism.

The economics of opportunity cost

Every euro sunk into new nuclear is a euro not available for faster, cheaper solutions. A 10 billion-euro reactor might take 15 years to produce its first electrons. The same money could build tens of gigawatts of solar and wind, backed by large-scale storage, grid upgrades, and hydrogen electrolysers to absorb surplus power, all online before the nuclear project breaks ground.

The opportunity cost is immense. Renewable portfolios are now financeable at market rates; nuclear requires a bespoke government rescue package before it even begins.

A niche role, not a blueprint

To be clear, existing reactors that can be safely life-extended make sense. Extending France’s fleet, or upgrading proven units, delivers low-carbon energy at marginal cost. But that’s asset management, not a case for new construction.

Building a fresh wave of reactors on 20-year timelines, in a power market already defined by negative pricing and flexible storage, is a strategic mismatch. Nuclear can remain a niche contributor, but not the foundation of affordable or adaptable decarbonization.

Conclusion: The future has moved on

The myth of nuclear as “secure, clean, and cheap” collapses under scrutiny. It is clean once built, but rarely cheap, and often far from secure when you consider financing and policy risk. Meanwhile, renewables plus storage are delivering real, scalable, market-driven results right now.

We no longer live in a world where the problem is lack of technology. The challenge is choosing the right ones for the energy system we are actually building, a fast, flexible, decentralized grid where adaptability equals security.

Nuclear still has a role in some places. But pretending it will power a new era of cheap, secure energy is not realism, it’s nostalgia.

By Leon Stille for Oilprice.com