As the UK is going through torturous negotiations over the strike price with EDF which may be as high as £100 a megawatt hour, troche I was fascinated to read that in China the nuclear price per kilowatt hour has just been set this July at the wholesale level of CNY 0.43 per kWh or 7 US cents/kWh – for all new nuclear power projects. At current exchange rates, advice that equates to about £47 per megawatt hour or half what we will probably pay here and right in line with our current wholesale market price.
Obviously it helps if you are currently building 28 nuclear power reactors and want as much as 400 GWe by 2050 as opposed to one or two within the next 9 years. But it also shows that when it comes to delivering nuclear power on the cheap, the UK has a lot to learn.
If it was up to me, the cheapest way would be to lay a second interconnector cable across the channel and buy nuclear power forward from France over 10 years. With France rapidly de-industrialising, I suspect there will be quite a lot to go around.