7 ms·

Completely doomed, mostly due to artificial constraints. When you dig into why it takes 10-20 years to get one built, you arrive, more or less, at the feet of

Completely doomed, mostly due to artificial constraints. When you dig into why it takes 10-20 years to get one built, you arrive, more or less, at the feet of incompetent regulators, that order changes during construction, after plans are initially approved, and then they can/do order more changes before they'll allow the plant to operate. Now, don't take that as "loose nuclear regulation good", that's not really a solution, what we need is much, much better regulation, so a plant can get approved and then built without interference provided the plan that was approved is followed. And, realistically, once you have that, you can come up with a plant design that you can copy/paste in a bunch of locations, instead of building them as one-off's, and that not only reduces costs significantly, but also improves safety significantly because if one plant has an issue, you can also copy/paste the solution/mitigation/prevention elsewhere.

epistasis 3y ago
Having followed Vogtle and Summer very very closely, as I was very eager for e a nuclear renaissance to fight climate change, this story does not hold up. Similarly, the "blame the regulators" game does not work for recent reactors in Finland and France based on the latest design. What it really comes down to is incompetence on the design side and on the production side. As well as not taking the requirements seriously, at least with some of the contractors. The design change story was more true back in the early 80s, but even then it was only part of the story. Good projects finished quickly, in any case, back then. A bigger problem was vastly over ordering nuclear too, in a planning failure. Fundamentally, nuclear construction has to deal with the fact that in advanced economies, labor only gets more expensive and more valuable. And the foundations of big nuclear reactors are massive scale and massive labor coordination. There's so much high skill welding, that needs to be checked so thoroughly, since it needs to last so long. There are some, like Jigar Shah, who think a nuclear industry can be built if leaders emerge who reject the blame game and take accountability onto themselves for actually making a product that utilities want to buy, and doing it on budget and on time. I'm skeptical, after having Westinghouse and the EPCs dash my hopes, and seeing the same failures in Europe at the same time. But I hope I am wrong. However I don't see a single thing in this a16z article to make me think that they will be able to pick and fund those leaders. Let the VCs be the dumb money to find a model that works, then Shah will bring the capital that can really make it scale, IMHO.
- tuatoru 3y ago
  Bent Flyvbjerg has a lot to say about this. He has a new book out How Big Things Get Done In a database of thousands of projects over $1B in size, nuclear power projects come out third worst for cost overruns, behind (before?) Olympic Games hosting and Nuclear Waste Storage Facilities. The kicker: that's construction, after approvals. It's not even close, either. 1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Bent+Flyvbjerg+How+Big+Things+Get+Done&t=lm&atb=v148-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Bent+Flyvbjerg+How+Big+Things+Get+...

epistasis 3y ago

Having followed Vogtle and Summer very very closely, as I was very eager for e a nuclear renaissance to fight climate change, this story does not hold up. Similarly, the "blame the regulators" game does not work for recent reactors in Finland and France based on the latest design. What it really comes down to is incompetence on the design side and on the production side. As well as not taking the requirements seriously, at least with some of the contractors. The design change story was more true back in the early 80s, but even then it was only part of the story. Good projects finished quickly, in any case, back then. A bigger problem was vastly over ordering nuclear too, in a planning failure. Fundamentally, nuclear construction has to deal with the fact that in advanced economies, labor only gets more expensive and more valuable. And the foundations of big nuclear reactors are massive scale and massive labor coordination. There's so much high skill welding, that needs to be checked so thoroughly, since it needs to last so long. There are some, like Jigar Shah, who think a nuclear industry can be built if leaders emerge who reject the blame game and take accountability onto themselves for actually making a product that utilities want to buy, and doing it on budget and on time. I'm skeptical, after having Westinghouse and the EPCs dash my hopes, and seeing the same failures in Europe at the same time. But I hope I am wrong. However I don't see a single thing in this a16z article to make me think that they will be able to pick and fund those leaders. Let the VCs be the dumb money to find a model that works, then Shah will bring the capital that can really make it scale, IMHO.

tuatoru 3y ago
Bent Flyvbjerg has a lot to say about this. He has a new book out How Big Things Get Done In a database of thousands of projects over $1B in size, nuclear power projects come out third worst for cost overruns, behind (before?) Olympic Games hosting and Nuclear Waste Storage Facilities. The kicker: that's construction, after approvals. It's not even close, either. 1. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Bent+Flyvbjerg+How+Big+Things+Get+Done&t=lm&atb=v148-1&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Bent+Flyvbjerg+How+Big+Things+Get+...