Why two nuclear plants might end up costing up to €275 billion — and why solar wins without even trying.
Disclaimer: This analysis is not anti-nuclear — it’s about math and realism.
And besides that; I know how to create an Excel sheet and do some basic math. 🙂
Several Dutch political parties want to build up to four new nuclear power plants. Yet not a single commercial company has shown interest in actually doing it.
That fact alone should make you think.
I created an Excel sheet ( Actually it’s a LibreOffice document ) which calculates:
- Initial building costs
- Interest during construction ( IDC )
- Depreciation over its lifetime
- Running costs
- Decommisioning
- Long term storage of spent fuel
Assumptions
- 20 years to build
- 60 year lifespan
- 5% interest rate
- 70 – 90% Capacity factor
- 700M/year in running costs
- 2x 1600MWe units
The numbers
Initial building costs
Estimates range from €12.5 billion up to €18 billion per unit — depending on which political source or report you read.
That’s €25–36 billion for two reactors
Interest During Construction (IDC)
With a 5% interest rate and a 20-year construction period, the financing costs compound to around €18 billion — assuming a base construction cost of €18 billion per unit.
In other words, by the time the first reactor goes online, you’ve already spent almost as much on interest alone as on the concrete and steel.
Depreciation
This one’s a bit trickier — but luckily, LibreOffice does the math for me.
The formula is: =PMT(interest; lifespan; -initialcosts)
Plug in the numbers and you get roughly €2.8 billion per year in depreciation over a 60-year lifespan.
That’s a lot of years — and a lot of billions — before you even start thinking about maintenance or decommisioning.
Running costs
Staffing, maintenance, insurance, fuel replacement, and regulatory oversight — it all adds up.
Estimates range between €500 million and €700 million per year just to keep the reactors running safely and legally.
Decommissioning
This one’s fairly simple: about €1 billion per GWe of installed capacity.
With 3.2 GWe in total, that adds up to roughly €3.2 billion just to take everything apart when it’s all over.
And that’s assuming nothing “glows” longer than expected. 😛
Long term storage
Spent fuel needs to be stored safely for millennia — quite literally.
Using COVRA’s official figures for current Dutch nuclear waste and scaling them up for an additional 3.2 GWe, the total comes to roughly €5 billion in long-term storage costs.
The totals
Pessimistic scenario
| Build | € 36.000.000.000,00 |
| IDC factor | € 18.000.000.000,00 |
| Running cost | € 42.000.000.000,00 |
| Depreciation | € 171.163.317.868,27 |
| Decommissioning | € 3.200.000.000,00 |
| Storage | € 5.000.000.000,00 |
| Total | € 275.363.317.868,27 |
Yes. 275B Insane!
Optimistic scenario
When I take the most optimistic numbers I get this:
| Build | € 25.000.000.000,00 |
| IDC factor | € 5.000.000.000,00 |
| Running cost | € 30.000.000.000,00 |
| Depreciation | € 51.782.338.486,45 |
| Decommissioning | € 3.200.000.000,00 |
| Storage | € 5.000.000.000,00 |
| Total | € 119.982.338.486,45 |
Even in the most optimistic case, €120 billion is hardly a bargain.
The resulting cost per MWh lands somewhere between €79 and €240 per MWh, depending on which assumptions you use.
For comparison: solar power costs around €41–44 per MWh, according to recent studies by Fraunhofer ISE.
In other words — nuclear isn’t just expensive; it’s magnitudes more expensive than the technologies already winning the energy race.
Nuclear? A dead man walking. But hey, that’s just me — and my spreadsheet.
Dutch article: https://www.familie-kleinman.nl/energie/echte-kosten-van-twee-kerncentrales/