12 ms·

Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original cost was 3 billion euro but landed

Something like this. The project started in 2000, construction began in 2005 and should have been completed in 2010. Original cost was 3 billion euro but landed on over 10 billion euro. It is the first nuclear reactor in Europe for 15 years so not much working experience or available sub contractors. Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously.

krono 5y ago
> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. Any insight into the why?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jpgvm 5y ago
  They didn't lose their nuclear capability because they kept maintaining and building reactors instead of decommissioning them. US and to a degree most of Europe did not. China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans. Russia has reactor building capabilities that are still current but their domestic needs are stagnating so said capability could decay as they don't actually need to build modern reactors at this time. Japan has a similar problem to Russia in that post-Fukishima there isn't domestic demand for nuclear reactors. However they are building reactors for other countries, in particular I think they are planning to build ~20 good sized reactors in India.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out, but nobody knows how many of those will actually ever be built or operated. There is anyway not fuel for that many, at present. It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many of those will be completed, or how many of those completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or where operated actually mainly generate power, as opposed to generating plutonium and tritium for weapons.
    - jpgvm 5y ago
      The pebble bed reactors are pretty much useless for making weapons grade material. The design was built with non-proliferation in mind. If they wanted to do that they would have just built more of their LWR design. What do you mean there isn't enough fuel? Not enough pellets/pebbles? Well ofcourse.. there is only 2 operational reactors right now... not enough uranium? Yeah no. There is way more than enough uranium to fuel their projected fleet and it's not like they are building it tomorrow, it's probably going to take until around 2050 to complete. China has a track record of saying they will do something and then actually doing it, I'm inclined to believe they will make good on that number. I get that people don't like China but lets be serious, no-one else is actually as serious about nuclear power as them right now.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Xi is old. Will the next dictator share Xi's enthusiasm for high-cost power when the rest of the world is on low-cost power? Any organization as big as the Chinese gov't makes lots of plans, and changes them as conditions change. It is one thing to be prepared to build a lot of nukes, entirely another to start building them, and entirely a third to finish them. The last will depend on conditions in the world, and of political alliances at the time.
        unrealhoang 5y ago
        > when the rest of the world is on low-cost power? And regret about it? The French are in much better position compared to the German with that low-cost power enthusiasm yet still heavily dependent on burning fossil.
        jpgvm 5y ago
        I think you overestimate how expensive these reactors will be. Also they are part of a mix naturally. China has such vast energy needs they are still building coal, LNG, solar and nuclear all alongside each other. My current feeling is that if they stick to their plan and build these smaller 600MW reactors that can mostly be built in factories and assembled on-site it's going to be a vastly different economic proposition than existing "big nuclear" that has been attempted in the West. Of course there is no way to know exactly how it plays out but the inputs look good.
- cbhl 5y ago
  Probably large fixed costs (engineers, builders learning how to do the thing) amortized over building a large number of plants. China has been constructing a lot of new nuclear power plants over the last 15 years -- estimated at ~12 GW in 2013, but now closer to 50 GW as of 2021. Wikipedia says 50 plants as of 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China. Anecdotally I've heard that temporary pollution control measures during the 2008 olympics gave the populace and decision makers a taste of reduced air pollution, and gave increased political willpower to invest in solar, wind, and nuclear power generation.
- cipher_system 5y ago
  I read a report on that a while back, can't find it now but these are the highlights I remember: * The overall design must be done before construction starts, also no room for regulatory changes. Waterfall is better than Agile for nuclear. * Experienced project management, work force and supply chain. * Build many reactors on the same site and don't use a new reactor design. * Work force is overall cheaper and possibly also more productive in Asia. More or less the same as for everything else, the more you do it the better and cheaper it gets but it requires a lot of upfront costs.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  To a large extent, because they're building established designs. An EPR plant (that is, the same design as this one) was completed in China in about half the time of the Finnish one, but that would have been informed by the problems in building the Finnish EPR, which was the first in the world. Another EPR, being built by EDF (a French company) in the UK is broadly on-track, and should have a much shorter time to switch-on than the Finnish one. This isn't new; historically, the first couple of examples of any given nuclear power plant design have typically seen major overruns.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > > Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. > Any insight into the why? At least as for China, one gets the feeling (from recent news about COVID-19 hospitals being built in a week, the world's largest dam in a few years, etc) that with a population of over a billion, they do it Pharaonic Egypt pyramid-building style: Throw a few thousand engineers and a few hundred thousand construction workers at anything, and you will get something built.
Godel_unicode 5y ago
I think this is vastly misunderstood in the (artificial) renewables vs nuclear conversation. We keep building effectively one-off complex machines, and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  The difference is that nuclear is the only one where the first one’s cost is measured in the the tens of billions. Nuclear is just too big for a privatized energy market’s participants.
  - cpill 5y ago
    what happened to the micro nuclear?
    - afterburner 5y ago
      You mean the theoretical ones?
    - thedrbrian 5y ago
      We’re doing it https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/ https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/rolls-royce-smr-to-begin-regulatory-assessment/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/rolls-royce-smr-to-begin-regul...
    - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      So far every attempt at small modular reactors built assembly line style has failed. Currently there's two projects with some momentum: NuScale's pilot plant in Idaho, and the recently announced Rolls Royce project. Sadly NuScale seems to be struggling to meet timeline and cost targets, and there were some headlines last year about the sponsoring utility pulling out of the project. I'm rooting for them but it doesn't look good. The RR project is still just on paper really, and is closer to a medium sized reactor than SMR. Maybe they've cracked the code? Maybe not, we'll see. Every nuclear thread here people chime in with a reflexive "just build nuclear smarter" answer without actually addressing why every prior attempt at this has failed. A lot of people don't want to develop an understanding of the challenges more sophisticated than smugly blaming environmental activists, over regulation, etc. Look at these projects from the prospective of potential private investment. Anyone doing basic due diligence is going to realize that the odds are stacked against a project hitting it's time and cost goals. Then you look at the trend lines for levelized cost of renewables + storage, and you realize that even in the best case scenario, within 2 decades you may be squeezed out of the market even if the efficiencies of scale and learning kick in.
sharken 5y ago
The Wikipedia page on the plant has a very detailed timeline of this 22-year long endeavour. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
epistasis 5y ago
> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. When did Japan last build a nuclear reactor? I don't think any time recently. South Korea used to be touted as a success at construction without massive overruns, but it turns out that it was largely a result or corruption and skimping on safety inspections: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/s-korea-jails-nuclear-workers-over-bribe-scandal https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/s-korea-jails-nuclear-work... As for China and Russia, we don't really have much insight to what they are doing as far as safety. China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west, so perhaps their numbers are reasonable for construction costs. > If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously. We would need entirely new designs unlike what has been built in the past. Both France and the US have negative learning rates when building the same reactor design multiple times, and that was 50 years ago when construction was a much more effective part of our economies. I do not believe that nuclear is a smart energy source to pursue given our modern production capabilities. There's a bevy of nuclear startups trying smaller reactors that might be able to constrain construction costs. But in the past these designs have been rejected because of the loss of economy of scale, as being too expensive per watt. Of the potential carbon neutral energy sources of the future, nuclear is one of the e least practical. It may supply a tiny fraction of our future power, maybe 10%, but without a major revolution soon on construction, our aging reactors will be shut down at end of life without any way to build more of them.
- jotm 5y ago
  > China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west Are they? Considering that their population is higher than the whole of North America + EU + Russia combined, wouldn't it be fair to compare it that way? Sure, it's one country as opposed to several, but still, the population plays a huge role in this "amazing construction at scale".
  - bllguo 5y ago
    can you flesh this out, why exactly does a larger population mean more efficient construction projects? i don't follow seems to me other factors like economics and government structure are more important, don't think a 4x larger US would be building faster and more cheaply
trenchgun 5y ago
The Finnish customer paid 5,5 billion euros price for it. Rest was covered by Areva, since the cost overruns were of their own failure.
- afterburner 5y ago
  They're going to be recouping their costs somehow, I doubt Finnish customers are done paying.
afterburner 5y ago
Even worse, it was meant to be finished in 2009, not 2010. It took over 4 times as long to built as pitched, and over 3 times as expensive. Everyone doing comparison calculations with renewables, remember that.
estaseuropano 5y ago
EDF (France) keeps building nuclear reactors around the world. Not sure whether they are the only EU company active in that market, but I doubt it. Either way, some expertise definitely exists in Europe. Germany had spectacular delays and overruns for a new airport for Berlin That too doesn't mean Europe forgot how to build airports.
- moogly 5y ago
  This reactor was designed/partially built by Framatome/Areva/EDF/whatever the ownership structure is now after the various Areva scandals. Siemens erected the building. Same design as the Flamanville plant that's still not finished. Two reactors vessels shipped to China also from the same design. Time delays (took over 7 years to construct; original plan was 4), structural issues in the reactor containment vessel during manufacturing due to shoddy work by Areva and substandard alloy quality delivered by the Areva subsidiary. This is also the nuclear plant (Taishan) that was in the news last year regarding damaged fuel rods. That's the output from the experts in France so far. Areva was basically shuttered and written off as a loss during all this. A part of the company only still exists as part of this Finland deal.
mkoubaa 5y ago
Economies of scale is a factor even when going from 1 to 12

krono 5y ago

> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. Any insight into the why?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jpgvm 5y ago
They didn't lose their nuclear capability because they kept maintaining and building reactors instead of decommissioning them. US and to a degree most of Europe did not. China in particular plans to build ~250 new reactors over the next few years, most like new HTG reactors based on the pebble bed technology Germany sold to them when they abandoned their next-gen nuclear plans. Russia has reactor building capabilities that are still current but their domestic needs are stagnating so said capability could decay as they don't actually need to build modern reactors at this time. Japan has a similar problem to Russia in that post-Fukishima there isn't domestic demand for nuclear reactors. However they are building reactors for other countries, in particular I think they are planning to build ~20 good sized reactors in India.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  This "250" number for China keeps being trotted out, but nobody knows how many of those will actually ever be built or operated. There is anyway not fuel for that many, at present. It would be more honest to cite the much smaller number that have actually broken ground. Nobody knows how many of those will be completed, or how many of those completed will be fueled or operated continuously, or where operated actually mainly generate power, as opposed to generating plutonium and tritium for weapons.
  - jpgvm 5y ago
    The pebble bed reactors are pretty much useless for making weapons grade material. The design was built with non-proliferation in mind. If they wanted to do that they would have just built more of their LWR design. What do you mean there isn't enough fuel? Not enough pellets/pebbles? Well ofcourse.. there is only 2 operational reactors right now... not enough uranium? Yeah no. There is way more than enough uranium to fuel their projected fleet and it's not like they are building it tomorrow, it's probably going to take until around 2050 to complete. China has a track record of saying they will do something and then actually doing it, I'm inclined to believe they will make good on that number. I get that people don't like China but lets be serious, no-one else is actually as serious about nuclear power as them right now.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Xi is old. Will the next dictator share Xi's enthusiasm for high-cost power when the rest of the world is on low-cost power? Any organization as big as the Chinese gov't makes lots of plans, and changes them as conditions change. It is one thing to be prepared to build a lot of nukes, entirely another to start building them, and entirely a third to finish them. The last will depend on conditions in the world, and of political alliances at the time.
      - unrealhoang 5y ago
        > when the rest of the world is on low-cost power? And regret about it? The French are in much better position compared to the German with that low-cost power enthusiasm yet still heavily dependent on burning fossil.
      - jpgvm 5y ago
        I think you overestimate how expensive these reactors will be. Also they are part of a mix naturally. China has such vast energy needs they are still building coal, LNG, solar and nuclear all alongside each other. My current feeling is that if they stick to their plan and build these smaller 600MW reactors that can mostly be built in factories and assembled on-site it's going to be a vastly different economic proposition than existing "big nuclear" that has been attempted in the West. Of course there is no way to know exactly how it plays out but the inputs look good.
cbhl 5y ago
Probably large fixed costs (engineers, builders learning how to do the thing) amortized over building a large number of plants. China has been constructing a lot of new nuclear power plants over the last 15 years -- estimated at ~12 GW in 2013, but now closer to 50 GW as of 2021. Wikipedia says 50 plants as of 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China. Anecdotally I've heard that temporary pollution control measures during the 2008 olympics gave the populace and decision makers a taste of reduced air pollution, and gave increased political willpower to invest in solar, wind, and nuclear power generation.
cipher_system 5y ago
I read a report on that a while back, can't find it now but these are the highlights I remember: * The overall design must be done before construction starts, also no room for regulatory changes. Waterfall is better than Agile for nuclear. * Experienced project management, work force and supply chain. * Build many reactors on the same site and don't use a new reactor design. * Work force is overall cheaper and possibly also more productive in Asia. More or less the same as for everything else, the more you do it the better and cheaper it gets but it requires a lot of upfront costs.
rsynnott 5y ago
To a large extent, because they're building established designs. An EPR plant (that is, the same design as this one) was completed in China in about half the time of the Finnish one, but that would have been informed by the problems in building the Finnish EPR, which was the first in the world. Another EPR, being built by EDF (a French company) in the UK is broadly on-track, and should have a much shorter time to switch-on than the Finnish one. This isn't new; historically, the first couple of examples of any given nuclear power plant design have typically seen major overruns.
CRConrad 5y ago
> > Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. > Any insight into the why? At least as for China, one gets the feeling (from recent news about COVID-19 hospitals being built in a week, the world's largest dam in a few years, etc) that with a population of over a billion, they do it Pharaonic Egypt pyramid-building style: Throw a few thousand engineers and a few hundred thousand construction workers at anything, and you will get something built.

Godel_unicode 5y ago

I think this is vastly misunderstood in the (artificial) renewables vs nuclear conversation. We keep building effectively one-off complex machines, and then flushing all that knowledge down the drain by saying it cost too much and took too long. Like yes, the first one always takes longer and costs more...

bobthepanda 5y ago
The difference is that nuclear is the only one where the first one’s cost is measured in the the tens of billions. Nuclear is just too big for a privatized energy market’s participants.
- cpill 5y ago
  what happened to the micro nuclear?
  - afterburner 5y ago
    You mean the theoretical ones?
  - thedrbrian 5y ago
    We’re doing it https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/ https://www.rolls-royce-smr.com/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/rolls-royce-smr-to-begin-regulatory-assessment/ https://www.theengineer.co.uk/rolls-royce-smr-to-begin-regul...
  - jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
    So far every attempt at small modular reactors built assembly line style has failed. Currently there's two projects with some momentum: NuScale's pilot plant in Idaho, and the recently announced Rolls Royce project. Sadly NuScale seems to be struggling to meet timeline and cost targets, and there were some headlines last year about the sponsoring utility pulling out of the project. I'm rooting for them but it doesn't look good. The RR project is still just on paper really, and is closer to a medium sized reactor than SMR. Maybe they've cracked the code? Maybe not, we'll see. Every nuclear thread here people chime in with a reflexive "just build nuclear smarter" answer without actually addressing why every prior attempt at this has failed. A lot of people don't want to develop an understanding of the challenges more sophisticated than smugly blaming environmental activists, over regulation, etc. Look at these projects from the prospective of potential private investment. Anyone doing basic due diligence is going to realize that the odds are stacked against a project hitting it's time and cost goals. Then you look at the trend lines for levelized cost of renewables + storage, and you realize that even in the best case scenario, within 2 decades you may be squeezed out of the market even if the efficiencies of scale and learning kick in.

sharken 5y ago

The Wikipedia page on the plant has a very detailed timeline of this 22-year long endeavour. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

epistasis 5y ago

> Apparently, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia can build at a third of the cost and time of that. When did Japan last build a nuclear reactor? I don't think any time recently. South Korea used to be touted as a success at construction without massive overruns, but it turns out that it was largely a result or corruption and skimping on safety inspections: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/s-korea-jails-nuclear-workers-over-bribe-scandal https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/s-korea-jails-nuclear-work... As for China and Russia, we don't really have much insight to what they are doing as far as safety. China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west, so perhaps their numbers are reasonable for construction costs. > If nuclear energy should be considered, much more must be built more continuously. We would need entirely new designs unlike what has been built in the past. Both France and the US have negative learning rates when building the same reactor design multiple times, and that was 50 years ago when construction was a much more effective part of our economies. I do not believe that nuclear is a smart energy source to pursue given our modern production capabilities. There's a bevy of nuclear startups trying smaller reactors that might be able to constrain construction costs. But in the past these designs have been rejected because of the loss of economy of scale, as being too expensive per watt. Of the potential carbon neutral energy sources of the future, nuclear is one of the e least practical. It may supply a tiny fraction of our future power, maybe 10%, but without a major revolution soon on construction, our aging reactors will be shut down at end of life without any way to build more of them.

jotm 5y ago
> China is seems to be successful at large scale construction projects in a way that we can not replicate in the west Are they? Considering that their population is higher than the whole of North America + EU + Russia combined, wouldn't it be fair to compare it that way? Sure, it's one country as opposed to several, but still, the population plays a huge role in this "amazing construction at scale".
- bllguo 5y ago
  can you flesh this out, why exactly does a larger population mean more efficient construction projects? i don't follow seems to me other factors like economics and government structure are more important, don't think a 4x larger US would be building faster and more cheaply

trenchgun 5y ago

The Finnish customer paid 5,5 billion euros price for it. Rest was covered by Areva, since the cost overruns were of their own failure.

afterburner 5y ago
They're going to be recouping their costs somehow, I doubt Finnish customers are done paying.

afterburner 5y ago

Even worse, it was meant to be finished in 2009, not 2010. It took over 4 times as long to built as pitched, and over 3 times as expensive. Everyone doing comparison calculations with renewables, remember that.

estaseuropano 5y ago

EDF (France) keeps building nuclear reactors around the world. Not sure whether they are the only EU company active in that market, but I doubt it. Either way, some expertise definitely exists in Europe. Germany had spectacular delays and overruns for a new airport for Berlin That too doesn't mean Europe forgot how to build airports.

moogly 5y ago
This reactor was designed/partially built by Framatome/Areva/EDF/whatever the ownership structure is now after the various Areva scandals. Siemens erected the building. Same design as the Flamanville plant that's still not finished. Two reactors vessels shipped to China also from the same design. Time delays (took over 7 years to construct; original plan was 4), structural issues in the reactor containment vessel during manufacturing due to shoddy work by Areva and substandard alloy quality delivered by the Areva subsidiary. This is also the nuclear plant (Taishan) that was in the news last year regarding damaged fuel rods. That's the output from the experts in France so far. Areva was basically shuttered and written off as a loss during all this. A part of the company only still exists as part of this Finland deal.

mkoubaa 5y ago

Economies of scale is a factor even when going from 1 to 12