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> ...seven years late and $17 billion over budget... And how much of that was a result of red tape from the NRC, DOE, and EPA?
by mikece 3y ago
> ...seven years late and $17 billion over budget...
And how much of that was a result of red tape from the NRC, DOE, and EPA?
- pavlov 3y agoI don’t know, but new nuclear projects in the West tend to be extremely late and over budget even with friendly regulators. Olkiluoto 3 in Finland is a Gen 3 reactor that just came online earlier this year. Its original target date was 2010. The original budget was 3 billion euros, but the final cost was over 11 billion. The project was of great national importance because this single unit provides around 14% of power to the country, and the Finnish nuclear power regulator was extremely motivated to make it happen. So the delays and cost overruns were not due to red tape.
- epistasis 3y agoIt's easy to find detailed retrospectives of the multitude of failures here. I haven't found a single one that said excess regulation was a problem, but I have found a huge number that showed project management, bad design, bad communication between engineers and EPC, etc. were all to blame. Here's one I was reading recently from 2017, about the welding issues. Every other aspect, such as concrete, exhibited similar failures. https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of-a-huge-nuclear-construction-flop https://www.enr.com/articles/43325-witness-to-the-origins-of... But if you have an idea of which regulations to change, or how to fix project management, you can pick up a half-completed pair of reactors in South Carolina on the cheap. That boondoggle often gets forgotten when examining Vogtle.