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You're radically off the mark. It's $100k per year per construction worker to build a nuclear power plant. Their pay will be $50k just for the base for an aver

by shingen 15y ago

You're radically off the mark. It's $100k per year per construction worker to build a nuclear power plant. Their pay will be $50k just for the base for an average worker. The security issues (for various stages it requires a lot of background checks), the liability issues (requiring massive insurance outlays), the actual pay, the engineering requirements that the workers must qualify for (just finding the right engineers), any union tangles you run into, and so on. There is an extraordinarily long list of costs per employee to build a nuke plant. You're looking at upwards of $1 billion per year with 10,000 employees. It's very easy to see where it ends up costing $7 billion to deploy a new plant (it's going to cost 50% more with cost overruns). Even if you were to amazingly slice the worker cost to $50k per year flat fee, with zero added costs per employee, you're still talking $500m per year with 10k workers, and over the build term that's going to be $3.5 billion to $5 billion (7 to 10 years).

zeteo 15y ago
Upon closer inspection, they only use 1750 construction workers for 4 years per reactor. By your figures, that's 0.7 billion total. Let's assume the Chinese pay absolutely nothing for nuclear-reactor-qualified workers. Where do the other 4.3 billion per reactor go?
- minikomi 15y ago
  Navigating red tape?
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  The 14 billion number includes cost of capital. The actual construction cost I recall being cited for this project is closer to $9.5 billion. The remaining $4.5 billion are the interest you have to pay on a somewhat-high-risk $9 billion loan. Oh, and you have to start paying interest when you borrow the money, but don't start having revenues until 4+ years later. Cost of capital is very different in China, depending on who's funding the project and how. It's hard to compare exactly what the construction cost component of the Chinese numbers is, or whether they're even including the cost of capital at all. I strongly suspect it's not, since the article quoted is talking about the revenue Westinghouse/Shaw will receive, not the expenditures of the purchaser. So we're really comparing about $4.75 billion in the US to $2 billion in China. If the actual structures are somewhat different, land in the US somewhat more expensive, a lot less in the way of earthmoving needs to be done in one of the locations (say because people aren't worried about environmental impacts), then I can see a 2x difference in the price tag...

by shingen 15y ago

zeteo 15y ago

Upon closer inspection, they only use 1750 construction workers for 4 years per reactor. By your figures, that's 0.7 billion total. Let's assume the Chinese pay absolutely nothing for nuclear-reactor-qualified workers. Where do the other 4.3 billion per reactor go?

minikomi 15y ago
Navigating red tape?
bzbarsky 15y ago
The 14 billion number includes cost of capital. The actual construction cost I recall being cited for this project is closer to $9.5 billion. The remaining $4.5 billion are the interest you have to pay on a somewhat-high-risk $9 billion loan. Oh, and you have to start paying interest when you borrow the money, but don't start having revenues until 4+ years later. Cost of capital is very different in China, depending on who's funding the project and how. It's hard to compare exactly what the construction cost component of the Chinese numbers is, or whether they're even including the cost of capital at all. I strongly suspect it's not, since the article quoted is talking about the revenue Westinghouse/Shaw will receive, not the expenditures of the purchaser. So we're really comparing about $4.75 billion in the US to $2 billion in China. If the actual structures are somewhat different, land in the US somewhat more expensive, a lot less in the way of earthmoving needs to be done in one of the locations (say because people aren't worried about environmental impacts), then I can see a 2x difference in the price tag...