China is still benefiting from their incredible demographic dividend. Comparing us to them is misleading. It should be said that the west built all its reactors during its demographic dividend periods as well, maybe that’s relevant, maybe not. But food for thought.

The lifespan of the reactors are not that interesting. What matters are long term costs. With renewable power plants you generally replace a larger part of the power plant when you repower the power plant. But that’s because they don’t need a huge concrete structure and building to contain them, if you replace the part doing the work that’s already most of it. Repowering a renewable power plant is significantly cheaper than building a new one from scratch. How that pans out in the long term remains to be seen. But most likely costs will fall further as the world moves to mostly maintaining/repowering what it has rather than building new sites from scratch.

The size of the nuclear fuel (end product) is not at all interesting unless you’re building a space ship. I should say that future space exploration is one reason why I hope nuclear power stays alive in some form.

This fuel comes from ore. You need ~10tons of ore for 1kg of fuel. For the HALUE fuel needed by the SMR reactor that are supposed to save the industry you need ~40tons of ore. Still much better than oil and gas, by a wide margin. But it’s fundamentally not a renewable process and there are significant concerns around the supply chain of this fuel. Read up on France’s issues and concerns with its supplies from Niger and Namibia.

Fun fact btw: nuclear power contributes directly to global warming from the heat they emit. The effect is surprisingly significant. All thermal power plants equate to about the climate gas emissions from airplane travel if I remember correctly. The only upside is the effect disappears instantly when the power plant shuts down. But this is not an effect we can afford to multiply when we’re on the precipice of ecological collapse due to a warming planet.