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Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. It also means the flaws in the design have been corrected after a couple it

by vimy 5y ago

Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. It also means the flaws in the design have been corrected after a couple iterations. An EU wide team working to build 100 nuclear plants in Europe in 10 years will be a lot faster and cost a lot less than each country going at it alone with different designs. The problem isn’t technological or cost, it’s political. There is no political willingness to even try.

baybal2 5y ago
> Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. How can experience change anything about the costs of forging a 10 meter tall piece of superalloy?
- jsnell 5y ago
  Experience curves / Wright's law have been observed in a lot (most?) of manufacturing industries. Why would this be different?
  - baybal2 5y ago
    1. It will not do anything about material costs — reactor superalloy use will still be dwarfed by superalloy use by the rest of power generation industry, and marine 2. It will not do anything to the extremely expensive tooling needed to forge reactor vessels. If you want 10x production, you basically need 10x of these huge forging plants. 3. It will not do much about capital cost, as anything of this scale is never done for cash. 4. The extreme high quality standard needed can't be worked around. If you got a single cavity in the whole 10 meter piece, you scrap that whole 10 meter piece. This is unavoidable as the underlying physics. 5. The extreme level of defectoscopy, and manpower needed. It may be cheapened, and automated, but it wouldn't be much of a reduction of already small part of cost. 6. Logistic costs of the whole reactor vessel delivery can't go down by much either. Road closures are expensive. 7. Insurance cost for the reactor in transit... may go down, but it also is not much.

by vimy 5y ago

baybal2 5y ago

> Mass production means experienced teams so no costly delays because of inexperience. How can experience change anything about the costs of forging a 10 meter tall piece of superalloy?

jsnell 5y ago
Experience curves / Wright's law have been observed in a lot (most?) of manufacturing industries. Why would this be different?
- baybal2 5y ago
  1. It will not do anything about material costs — reactor superalloy use will still be dwarfed by superalloy use by the rest of power generation industry, and marine 2. It will not do anything to the extremely expensive tooling needed to forge reactor vessels. If you want 10x production, you basically need 10x of these huge forging plants. 3. It will not do much about capital cost, as anything of this scale is never done for cash. 4. The extreme high quality standard needed can't be worked around. If you got a single cavity in the whole 10 meter piece, you scrap that whole 10 meter piece. This is unavoidable as the underlying physics. 5. The extreme level of defectoscopy, and manpower needed. It may be cheapened, and automated, but it wouldn't be much of a reduction of already small part of cost. 6. Logistic costs of the whole reactor vessel delivery can't go down by much either. Road closures are expensive. 7. Insurance cost for the reactor in transit... may go down, but it also is not much.