At current prices, to power the UK for 36 hours off battery storage, it would cost (according to Gemini) £150bn to £400bn for the batteries alone - that doesn't include purchasing land, wiring them up and so on, nor the cost of the wind farms and solar panels to feed the batteries. We don't/can't/won't do hydro pumped storage in the UK.

Sizewell C, our massively overpriced nuclear power station, comes in at about £100bn.

It comes in at £100bn for 3GW - that's about 7% of total UK consumption. A huge amount to be sure, but the choice isn't £100bn for Sizewell or £400bn for batteries.

Rolls Royce SMR for Czechia at 0.5GW is about £3bn

To be clear - this doesn't exist. They "aim" to start construction in 3 years and it's a FOAK project so will surely be delayed. The initial target was a cost of £2bn - the paper cost has already increased by £1b without a shovel turning over a single grain of sand.

It's a huge shame and problem across the 'West' - but we can't build megaprojects for anything resembling a reasonable cost any more.

Appreciate the numbers. Keep in mind this discussion is US-focused; where politics dramatically influence nuclear's cost.

How many Sizewell C do you need to power all of the UK? That plant is only 3.5GW.

Why are you pretending that there's no wind in the UK? Or Germany? In fact, all of Europe is basically surrounded by a coastline with huge amounts of wind resources.

Or just gas peak already.

But look, if data centers want to fund a whole bunch of advanced nuclear and wait 10 years for it to get built and will foot the bill for the cost overruns, okay I'm not going to stop them.

But let's face it all. This nuclear stuff which is going to be for data centers is all an externalized cost that's going to be dumped on the public.