15 ms·

The people who oppose nuclear power always point to the construction cost and long delays. BUT. The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot t

The people who oppose nuclear power always point to the construction cost and long delays. BUT. The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to! This in an argument from unclean hands. Nuclear skeptics, like the ones given so much airtime in the linked article, have been very successful in driving up costs and adding delay. But these costs and delays are not intrinsic to the technology. It's not fair if I delay a thing for me to claim the thing has failed because it was late. No, it failed because I delayed it. I wish the nuclear skeptics would apply their delay tactics to coal power plants, which spew staggering amounts of radionuclides over huge swaths of the world, not to mention their carbon emissions.

PaywallBuster 3y ago
Nuclear is a decade long planning Doesn't work if the government changes hands every 4 years and comes with radical different ideas and starts reversing stuff from the previous government. Totally different to China, with their 20 year plans, where they're committed to developing nuclear, are putting superior resources into it and are building at scale. Every country with nuclear had a period where they went ahead and build a bunch. Building one or two in isolation is just a gamble
- TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
  Again, this isn’t intrinsic to the technology, we could be nuclear reactors on time and on budget if we decided to.
  - oneshtein 3y ago
    Then Russians will blow up a dam, so the reactor will run out of water for cooling and then run away into a Red Forest. OR climate change will make a water pond dry, so you cannot even start the reactor. OR terrorists will capture a reactor and mine it. OR massive change in water weight due to climate change will create a massive earthquake.
    - cpursley 3y ago
      Nuke plant aside, why would the Russians blow the main water supply to Crimea after only recently getting it back flowing? Or flood out the "Russian" side (their claim, not mine) of the area including their own troops? Especially when they could have just opened the gates. Guess I'm not understanding the logic or advantage here.
      - chrysler 3y ago
        Not only have Russians flooded cities, they are also firing artillery into flooded areas to hamper rescue efforts: https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1666784578747396098 https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/16667845787473960... If your mental model of the world sees Russia as a normal functional country instead of a terrorist state capable, willing and engaged in unrestricted warfare against civilians, then of course you'll find yourself in situations where you "don't understand" what's going on.
      - thx-2718 3y ago
        Distraction. Flooding. Can point fingers at Ukraine. Delays the counter offensive. The operation is disinformation. They know that the world news will report "both sides blame the other" and that's all they need. Russia has clearly demonstrated over the last year that their soldiers are disposable.
      - oneshtein 3y ago
        It's not possible to defend Crimea from land attacks, as demonstrated multiple times in history. Russians lost the hope to keep Crimea in their hands.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    If we could decide to do that, what precise changes could we make? I ask because I want nuclear to succeed, but see no path for what you say is possible. And I don't know a single person in the industry, or who is familiar with the failures, that sees the route to producing nuclear as cheaply as, say, China.
- epistasis 3y ago
  This is not an accurate description in any way of the nuclear regulatory process. Presidential elections, even if they swapped parties every four years, do not result in massive regulatory changes. The nuclear industry has no one but itself to blame for its failures and bankruptcies.
  - PaywallBuster 3y ago
    Just one example where a key investment gets blocked due to politics Keystone XL pipeline halted after Biden blocks permit https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57422456 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57422456 One presidency would approve it, the next one would disprove it
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  China relies on 5 year plans, and they still have to deal with a public that doesn’t just implicitly trust them to not be corrupt in the operation of a nuclear power plant. That delayed them at least 5 or so years in the current batch being built out.
epistasis 3y ago
The delays on this project have nothing at all to do with people opposing nuclear construction. The site welcomed more reactors. The results were approved under a new proces that was explicitly requested by the industry in order to expedite everything. Nuclear is a big construction project, and suffers from the same big construction project cost disease that every other big construction project suffers from in the US. In addition, it suffers from needing absolutely massive amounts of custom, high precision welding, and high precision concrete pours unlike any other construction project. In addition to being some of the most complex projects ever designed, it requires a large amount of highly skilled labor really only gets used for this one purpose in our economy. I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century, but a less good fit for the 21st century when labor is much more valuable, and perhaps we should put it to more valuable purposes when we have far cheaper alternatives. Building buildings for manufacturing results in much better utilization of labor. A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  More solar is better if it displaces fossil fuels, loads can be moved to coincide with sunshine, output can be cost effectively stored and/or the climate is co-operative. Not all of these assumptions hold everywhere or every time.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear. If we are serious about displacing fossil fuel use, and I am deadly serious about it, wind, solar, storage, demand response, new transmission, thermal storage, hydrogen for chemical process... all these things are deployable today at massive scale and should be quickly adopted. However, nuclear is further away and more expensive than we thought it was in 2008 when these reactors got started. Back in the mid-2000s I was a huge proponent of nuclear. In the mid-2010s I change my tune because we had a ton of new data about nuclear being far more expensive than promised, and other tech had advanced massively. Nuclear has never advanced as a tech, it does not have a learning curve. If we are going to reach a future with energy abundance, with clean tech, we need to invest in technologies with learning curves, that advance. Nuclear tech does not advance.
anovikov 3y ago
Not quite true: there is no public opposition to anything in Russia let's say, and they build their nuclear plants for about that long. Belarusian NPP construction started in March 2011 and first reactor went online in November 2020, 9.5 years. Chernobyl NPP was probably built faster than it should've been given many issues they introduced in the process, and it took 7.5 years from commencement to first reactor going online, May 1970 to December 1977. 10 years down the road, there simply won't be a place for non-renewable power left on the market, apart from natural gas peaker plants for grid balancing. Too late to start any new ones.
- htag 3y ago
  As the price of photovoltaic continues strongly downward, all other energy sources will seem increasingly expensive. So much energy will be consumed during the day, and more and more nighttime energy use will be constrained. The traditional power sources like Coal, Nuclear, and Oil will be slowly decommissioned as they age, leading towards a reduction of base generation. Gas peakers will be used as needed when the base generation plus renewables don't meet demand. Over time, batteries will become a larger and highly predictable system to handle peak demands. The price of battery storage is plummeting too. Although there are open questions on if the improvements in battery tech will continue, if it does continue then in 30 to 40 years the cheapest way to sell peak power will be to buy it during photovoltaic abundance, store it in a battery, and then release it. At this point we will be able to stop using gas peakers.
- u8080 3y ago
  Not true, for example Nizniy Novgorod NPP was cancelled despite being almost finished because of local radiophobic public movements. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%90%D0%A1%D0%A2 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA...
  - anovikov 3y ago
    Yes that was in the democratic era...
kuhewa 3y ago
> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! Citation needed.
godelski 3y ago
There's definitely truth to this and not. It's rather complicated. I don't want to get into arguments which will happen no matter what I say, so I'm just going to link three things and let the data speak for itself. [0] is the cost of energy by year. We notice that nuclear is the only one to increase and coal is stable while everything else decreases. As time goes by, things usually get cheaper, so we have to ask what's unique to nuclear. [1] Shows a graph of the decarbonization process of countries' energy sectors. I suggest including: US, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and China. [2] is a near real time map of energy production and tells you where the energy portfolio, its carbon intensity per source, and if the region imports/exports that electricity. All these matter. So we should all keep these things in mind when discussing energy because carbon is a critical part. This is HN, people are familiar with how to read data, right? Let's not fight, and let's try to start any discussion with some facts that are inarguable. This is just data. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth [1] https://ourworldindata.org/decarbonizing-energy-progress https://ourworldindata.org/decarbonizing-energy-progress [2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- ftth_finland 3y ago
  > We notice that nuclear is the only one to increase “ France and South Korea were at least able to keep prices and construction times constant.” “ those countries that were able to avoid price surges are countries that do not stand out in regulating nuclear power less, but in standardizing the construction of reactors more.”
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    Source will be appreciated as the claims seem to be false according to quick search. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19/french-winter-power-twice-as-pricey-as-germany-s-on-nuclear-woes#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19/french-wi... [2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price
    - 3y ago
lamontcg 3y ago
> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to! Citation required. Another explanation is that is that they're so complicated and expensive that it results in the people involved in managing the construction being incentivized to make it more expensive. They to siphon off as much as possible, empire build and collect more power for themselves by spending more money. And if they come up with more possible risks to mitigate, they sell a more complex and costly system and get more money, while the people doing oversight don't want to be the one that said okay to not mitigating a risk that causes a major problem down the line--they're so complicated that the safest butt-covering is to just spend the money. All of that is just organic, free-range American middle-management capitalism at work. No hippies required to make it expensive.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Take a look at California, at non-nuclear large construction projects. Do you think that the pervasive delays and cost overruns have nothing to do with many forces actively opposing (almost any) construction projects? Do you e.g. think that costs and delays of building a railway have much to do with inherent expenses and complexities of railway technology?
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    A lot of that has to do with pure NIMBYism and regulatory capture, and the bulk of the cost overruns are just contractors extracting what they can. Environmentalists are a useful weapon for them, and someone to conveniently blame. If you got rid of those laws it wouldn't get significantly cheaper.
- lenkite 3y ago
  How on earth is the US Navy managing its fleet of >64 nuclear powered submarines ?
  - natmaka 3y ago
jiggawatts 3y ago
> “argument from unclean hands” Finally! I’ve been looking for the name of that concept. My personal example is saying “Jumbo frames are a cheap way to get a 20% performance boost.” The network team argued with me about how expensive it would be for so long that it actually became expensive and no longer worth it.
datadeft 3y ago
There is also the narrative vs facts problem. "It takes forever to build a nuclear power plant and it is very expensive" This is a narrative. "Lets compare how MW capacity / day (how long it takes to build) across different energy sources" These are facts. If you can build 10 MW in 10 days vs 1200 MW in 365 days which one is better?
- pfdietz 3y ago
  This is ridiculous reasoning. There is nothing that prevents you from building renewable sources in parallel.
  - datadeft 3y ago
    There absolutely is, for example physics
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      Physics prevents us from building multiple renewable facilities at the same time? Do please explain. This sounds like utter bullshit.
cinntaile 3y ago
> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to! This doesn't make sense, the roadblocks have been cleared at that point. Once they started constructing, what opposition is still there?
- peteradio 3y ago
  The industry has atrophied, I don't think we can be WWII bombers anymore either or if we wanted to it would take some time to gain momentum.
LatteLazy 3y ago
This is not really true. Here in the UK we have been building Hinkey C and no review/protest/faff has been permitted. I am not sure the US could do that because you have a constitution, where as in the UK the law is whatever parliament says. The reactor is still years behind schedule and over budget. And even when it was on-budget, it was hideously expensive. If people still want nuclear, that is fine. But we have to be realistic and accept that it will take twice as much and cost a lot of money. Pretending otherwise just leads to bad decisions and worsens opposition in the long run.
natmaka 3y ago
The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville A piece about it: https://www.archyde.com/the-folz-report-draws-up-a-severe-assessment-of-the-failure-of-the-flamanville-epr/ https://www.archyde.com/the-folz-report-draws-up-a-severe-as... "the people opposing the construction" isn't a major cause. Pertinent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
- pfdietz 3y ago
  It should be added that not even the French think nuclear will power the world. If they did, they would not have mothballed their fast reactor program (breeders being necessary for a world that gets most of its energy from nuclear.)

PaywallBuster 3y ago

Nuclear is a decade long planning Doesn't work if the government changes hands every 4 years and comes with radical different ideas and starts reversing stuff from the previous government. Totally different to China, with their 20 year plans, where they're committed to developing nuclear, are putting superior resources into it and are building at scale. Every country with nuclear had a period where they went ahead and build a bunch. Building one or two in isolation is just a gamble

TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
Again, this isn’t intrinsic to the technology, we could be nuclear reactors on time and on budget if we decided to.
- oneshtein 3y ago
  Then Russians will blow up a dam, so the reactor will run out of water for cooling and then run away into a Red Forest. OR climate change will make a water pond dry, so you cannot even start the reactor. OR terrorists will capture a reactor and mine it. OR massive change in water weight due to climate change will create a massive earthquake.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    Nuke plant aside, why would the Russians blow the main water supply to Crimea after only recently getting it back flowing? Or flood out the "Russian" side (their claim, not mine) of the area including their own troops? Especially when they could have just opened the gates. Guess I'm not understanding the logic or advantage here.
    - chrysler 3y ago
      Not only have Russians flooded cities, they are also firing artillery into flooded areas to hamper rescue efforts: https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1666784578747396098 https://twitter.com/bayraktar_1love/status/16667845787473960... If your mental model of the world sees Russia as a normal functional country instead of a terrorist state capable, willing and engaged in unrestricted warfare against civilians, then of course you'll find yourself in situations where you "don't understand" what's going on.
    - thx-2718 3y ago
      Distraction. Flooding. Can point fingers at Ukraine. Delays the counter offensive. The operation is disinformation. They know that the world news will report "both sides blame the other" and that's all they need. Russia has clearly demonstrated over the last year that their soldiers are disposable.
    - oneshtein 3y ago
      It's not possible to defend Crimea from land attacks, as demonstrated multiple times in history. Russians lost the hope to keep Crimea in their hands.
- epistasis 3y ago
  If we could decide to do that, what precise changes could we make? I ask because I want nuclear to succeed, but see no path for what you say is possible. And I don't know a single person in the industry, or who is familiar with the failures, that sees the route to producing nuclear as cheaply as, say, China.
epistasis 3y ago
This is not an accurate description in any way of the nuclear regulatory process. Presidential elections, even if they swapped parties every four years, do not result in massive regulatory changes. The nuclear industry has no one but itself to blame for its failures and bankruptcies.
- PaywallBuster 3y ago
  Just one example where a key investment gets blocked due to politics Keystone XL pipeline halted after Biden blocks permit https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57422456 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57422456 One presidency would approve it, the next one would disprove it
seanmcdirmid 3y ago
China relies on 5 year plans, and they still have to deal with a public that doesn’t just implicitly trust them to not be corrupt in the operation of a nuclear power plant. That delayed them at least 5 or so years in the current batch being built out.

epistasis 3y ago

The delays on this project have nothing at all to do with people opposing nuclear construction. The site welcomed more reactors. The results were approved under a new proces that was explicitly requested by the industry in order to expedite everything. Nuclear is a big construction project, and suffers from the same big construction project cost disease that every other big construction project suffers from in the US. In addition, it suffers from needing absolutely massive amounts of custom, high precision welding, and high precision concrete pours unlike any other construction project. In addition to being some of the most complex projects ever designed, it requires a large amount of highly skilled labor really only gets used for this one purpose in our economy. I wish nuclear proponents would recognize the inherent challenges of the problem, the inherent labor and construction efficiencies that made nuclear a good fit for the mid-20th century, but a less good fit for the 21st century when labor is much more valuable, and perhaps we should put it to more valuable purposes when we have far cheaper alternatives. Building buildings for manufacturing results in much better utilization of labor. A manufacturing facilities that produce 4 GW of solar/year is an exponential improvement over a 1GW nuclear reactor.

ftth_finland 3y ago
More solar is better if it displaces fossil fuels, loads can be moved to coincide with sunshine, output can be cost effectively stored and/or the climate is co-operative. Not all of these assumptions hold everywhere or every time.
- epistasis 3y ago
  The same caveats are also true of nuclear, and happen far more frequently for nuclear. If we are serious about displacing fossil fuel use, and I am deadly serious about it, wind, solar, storage, demand response, new transmission, thermal storage, hydrogen for chemical process... all these things are deployable today at massive scale and should be quickly adopted. However, nuclear is further away and more expensive than we thought it was in 2008 when these reactors got started. Back in the mid-2000s I was a huge proponent of nuclear. In the mid-2010s I change my tune because we had a ton of new data about nuclear being far more expensive than promised, and other tech had advanced massively. Nuclear has never advanced as a tech, it does not have a learning curve. If we are going to reach a future with energy abundance, with clean tech, we need to invest in technologies with learning curves, that advance. Nuclear tech does not advance.

anovikov 3y ago

Not quite true: there is no public opposition to anything in Russia let's say, and they build their nuclear plants for about that long. Belarusian NPP construction started in March 2011 and first reactor went online in November 2020, 9.5 years. Chernobyl NPP was probably built faster than it should've been given many issues they introduced in the process, and it took 7.5 years from commencement to first reactor going online, May 1970 to December 1977. 10 years down the road, there simply won't be a place for non-renewable power left on the market, apart from natural gas peaker plants for grid balancing. Too late to start any new ones.

htag 3y ago
As the price of photovoltaic continues strongly downward, all other energy sources will seem increasingly expensive. So much energy will be consumed during the day, and more and more nighttime energy use will be constrained. The traditional power sources like Coal, Nuclear, and Oil will be slowly decommissioned as they age, leading towards a reduction of base generation. Gas peakers will be used as needed when the base generation plus renewables don't meet demand. Over time, batteries will become a larger and highly predictable system to handle peak demands. The price of battery storage is plummeting too. Although there are open questions on if the improvements in battery tech will continue, if it does continue then in 30 to 40 years the cheapest way to sell peak power will be to buy it during photovoltaic abundance, store it in a battery, and then release it. At this point we will be able to stop using gas peakers.
u8080 3y ago
Not true, for example Nizniy Novgorod NPP was cancelled despite being almost finished because of local radiophobic public movements. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%90%D0%A1%D0%A2 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA...
- anovikov 3y ago
  Yes that was in the democratic era...

kuhewa 3y ago

> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! Citation needed.

godelski 3y ago

There's definitely truth to this and not. It's rather complicated. I don't want to get into arguments which will happen no matter what I say, so I'm just going to link three things and let the data speak for itself. [0] is the cost of energy by year. We notice that nuclear is the only one to increase and coal is stable while everything else decreases. As time goes by, things usually get cheaper, so we have to ask what's unique to nuclear. [1] Shows a graph of the decarbonization process of countries' energy sectors. I suggest including: US, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, and China. [2] is a near real time map of energy production and tells you where the energy portfolio, its carbon intensity per source, and if the region imports/exports that electricity. All these matter. So we should all keep these things in mind when discussing energy because carbon is a critical part. This is HN, people are familiar with how to read data, right? Let's not fight, and let's try to start any discussion with some facts that are inarguable. This is just data. [0] https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth [1] https://ourworldindata.org/decarbonizing-energy-progress https://ourworldindata.org/decarbonizing-energy-progress [2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

ftth_finland 3y ago
> We notice that nuclear is the only one to increase “ France and South Korea were at least able to keep prices and construction times constant.” “ those countries that were able to avoid price surges are countries that do not stand out in regulating nuclear power less, but in standardizing the construction of reactors more.”
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  Source will be appreciated as the claims seem to be false according to quick search. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19/french-winter-power-twice-as-pricey-as-germany-s-on-nuclear-woes#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19/french-wi... [2]: https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price https://tradingeconomics.com/france/electricity-price
  - 3y ago

lamontcg 3y ago

> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to! Citation required. Another explanation is that is that they're so complicated and expensive that it results in the people involved in managing the construction being incentivized to make it more expensive. They to siphon off as much as possible, empire build and collect more power for themselves by spending more money. And if they come up with more possible risks to mitigate, they sell a more complex and costly system and get more money, while the people doing oversight don't want to be the one that said okay to not mitigating a risk that causes a major problem down the line--they're so complicated that the safest butt-covering is to just spend the money. All of that is just organic, free-range American middle-management capitalism at work. No hippies required to make it expensive.

nine_k 3y ago
Take a look at California, at non-nuclear large construction projects. Do you think that the pervasive delays and cost overruns have nothing to do with many forces actively opposing (almost any) construction projects? Do you e.g. think that costs and delays of building a railway have much to do with inherent expenses and complexities of railway technology?
- lamontcg 3y ago
  A lot of that has to do with pure NIMBYism and regulatory capture, and the bulk of the cost overruns are just contractors extracting what they can. Environmentalists are a useful weapon for them, and someone to conveniently blame. If you got rid of those laws it wouldn't get significantly cheaper.
lenkite 3y ago
How on earth is the US Navy managing its fleet of >64 nuclear powered submarines ?
- natmaka 3y ago

jiggawatts 3y ago

> “argument from unclean hands” Finally! I’ve been looking for the name of that concept. My personal example is saying “Jumbo frames are a cheap way to get a 20% performance boost.” The network team argued with me about how expensive it would be for so long that it actually became expensive and no longer worth it.

datadeft 3y ago

There is also the narrative vs facts problem. "It takes forever to build a nuclear power plant and it is very expensive" This is a narrative. "Lets compare how MW capacity / day (how long it takes to build) across different energy sources" These are facts. If you can build 10 MW in 10 days vs 1200 MW in 365 days which one is better?

pfdietz 3y ago
This is ridiculous reasoning. There is nothing that prevents you from building renewable sources in parallel.
- datadeft 3y ago
  There absolutely is, for example physics
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    Physics prevents us from building multiple renewable facilities at the same time? Do please explain. This sounds like utter bullshit.

cinntaile 3y ago

> The reason for the long and expensive construction has a lot to do with the people opposing the construction! We could build these reactors so much more cheaply and quickly (and more safely!) if we decided to! This doesn't make sense, the roadblocks have been cleared at that point. Once they started constructing, what opposition is still there?

peteradio 3y ago
The industry has atrophied, I don't think we can be WWII bombers anymore either or if we wanted to it would take some time to gain momentum.

LatteLazy 3y ago

This is not really true. Here in the UK we have been building Hinkey C and no review/protest/faff has been permitted. I am not sure the US could do that because you have a constitution, where as in the UK the law is whatever parliament says. The reactor is still years behind schedule and over budget. And even when it was on-budget, it was hideously expensive. If people still want nuclear, that is fine. But we have to be realistic and accept that it will take twice as much and cost a lot of money. Pretending otherwise just leads to bad decisions and worsens opposition in the long run.

natmaka 3y ago

The first EPR project in France (Flamanville-3) had problems documented in an official report (dubbed 'Folz', per the name of its main author), sadly AFAIK it wasn't translated into English: https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville A piece about it: https://www.archyde.com/the-folz-report-draws-up-a-severe-assessment-of-the-failure-of-the-flamanville-epr/ https://www.archyde.com/the-folz-report-draws-up-a-severe-as... "the people opposing the construction" isn't a major cause. Pertinent: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421510003526 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

pfdietz 3y ago
It should be added that not even the French think nuclear will power the world. If they did, they would not have mothballed their fast reactor program (breeders being necessary for a world that gets most of its energy from nuclear.)