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Yes, and the problem was that way too many of them were over budget and delayed. Even before Three Mile Island, orders for new nuclear had slowed massively beca
by epistasis 4y ago
Yes, and the problem was that way too many of them were over budget and delayed. Even before Three Mile Island, orders for new nuclear had slowed massively because utilities realized that ther massive risk for financial boondoggles.
Those nuclear reactors are now reaching their end of life, and will need to be phased out. France is realizing what happens when you don't replace your aging fleet fast enough: massive unreliability and extended shutdowns for maintenance and fixing things.
France also started to build new nuclear in the 2000s, at Flamanville, but it has been an utter debacle, that's ongoing to this day. It's to the point that even though the president has said he's going to order more reactors, it seems unlikely that many of them will ever complete.
- diordiderot 4y agoWhat if you just kept building them, learning each time, building tacit knowledge and economics of scale?
- epistasis 4y agoBuilding the same model of reactor a second, third, and fourth time has resulted in increasing cost in both the US and France. There are a few countries that have shown positive learning rather than negative learning, but there's questions about how much of that is from corruption and cheating rather than actual process improvements. (I'm thinking of South Korea here)