4 ms·
> Nuclear plants take a decade to build That very much depends on the country & regulatory environment. If you browse through the ones China has been building
by avar 10y ago
> Nuclear plants take a decade to build
That very much depends on the country & regulatory environment. If you browse through the ones China has been building [1] it seems to be taking them around 5-7 years from breaking first ground [2] and 5 years or so to add additional reactors to an existing site [3].
You can browse through other countries on that site & Wikipedia to see how long these things take to build. The only ones that take more than a decade are ones where the limiting factor is clearly not nuclear, but the regulatory environment.
1. https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.aspx?current=CN https://www.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails.a...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changjiang_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changjiang_Nuclear_Power_Plant
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuqing_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuqing_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- legulere 10y agoOne example how the regulatory environment hinders faster construction: In olkiluoto some contractor used some cheap concrete instead of the special one that was supposed to be used for safety reasons. The concrete was pulled out again and the right one used afterwards. What of this would have happened differently in China do you think?
- jessaustin 10y agoEverything gets built faster and more cheaply in China than in e.g. USA. Nuclear plants aren't special in that sense. There are trade-offs involved, and probably we could build stuff a bit faster here, but let's figure out how to build highways cheap and fast before blithely assuming we have the answer for cheap and fast nuclear plants.