The running costs per produced MW is so high that governments has to promise to effectively pay billions in subsidies to NPP:s both in terms of cheap state-backed loans and contract-for-difference power price because because they would otherwise not be viable.
That's actually not true. Running costs of nuclear power plants are extremely low, some of the lowest of all energy sources.
The reason that NPP operators now require guarantees from governments is to offset the incredibly lopsided benefits offered to intermittent renewables, including subsidies, cheap loans, guaranteed income regardless of demand and priority.
Nobody can effectively compete with the government handing out those kinds of benefits.
If running costs are so low as you claim, why does both the Swedish Government as well as plant owners such as Fortum claim that the only way to be profitable on the market is for the Government to subsidise the cost of running the plants?
Wind or Hydro in Sweden gets no such unique subsidies.
Because markets, as currently implemented for energy in EU, do not adequately include things like intermittency of demand.
If you take a source that has very low per-MWh price but very intermittent, it gets effectively highly prioritized and everyone else is paying price to match up with this wrecking ball. Except, usually, gas turbines which slot very very nicely into the swings in capacity related to wind and solar and thus benefit from them.
That's not true in Scandinavia (can't speak for EU as a whole). For example Nord Pool's market structure and pricing mechanisms are specifically designed to account for the intermittency of production and demand: https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/the-power-market/Intraday-m...
That's true for the UK and Spain as of 2023[1], but the other major energy markets in the EU incorporate significant capacity mechanisms in their pricing.
Edit: Spain added one in Feb 2025. Haven't looked up the UK yet.
Most of the cost is capex, so you want to run them at full load all the time to recoup investments. That is a bad fit for a market that increasingly rewards flexible generation.
Exactly this.
The running costs per produced MW is so high that governments has to promise to effectively pay billions in subsidies to NPP:s both in terms of cheap state-backed loans and contract-for-difference power price because because they would otherwise not be viable.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-proposes-stat...