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The full report is very detailed in addressing most of this - there is a chicken-egg problem for all of the issues they call out. You can't get a complete desi

The full report is very detailed in addressing most of this - there is a chicken-egg problem for all of the issues they call out. You can't get a complete design because nobody is going to spend the money designing a reactor that might never be built -- the utilities who buy them don't want to wait several years after committing to the project to wait for a finished design, so the engineering firms are selling 50% designs and the utilities are sending those plans to the firms to get fabrication started. Similar with all the specific trades - there's a ton of turnover because the job is so difficult due to the poor planning so they actually saw negative learning curves on Vogtle 4 -- it actually took them longer to complete much of the same work on the 2nd reactor they're building. The government is the only possible buyer who can fix these issues since they have an infinite timeline and infinite money to do so. We'd need a commitment to buy say 10 reactors of the same design, a design firm to commit to the length of the project and we'd have to pay them to get to an ~80% design multiple years before construction begins on the first plan. So we "just" need a stable government commitment to spend tens of billions of dollars over several decades.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> You can't get a complete design because nobody is going to spend the money designing a reactor that might never be built -- the utilities who buy them don't want to wait several years after committing to the project to wait for a finished design, so the engineering firms are selling 50% designs and the utilities are sending those plans to the firms to get fabrication started. They just finished building one, so start by build more of those. > there's a ton of turnover because the job is so difficult due to the poor planning Which is still the scale problem -- it's poor planning because they have no experience doing it. The more you build the more experience people have. > they actually saw negative learning curves on Vogtle 4 -- it actually took them longer to complete much of the same work on the 2nd reactor they're building. COVID hit during Vogtle 4, which is obviously an outlier. > So we "just" need a stable government commitment to spend tens of billions of dollars over several decades. By some estimates the US government pays $20B in subsidies a year to the oil industry, so this isn't even a big ask. But it's also not clear why you inherently need there to be a single buyer. Why can't 10 independent entities all buy reactors of the same design?

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> You can't get a complete design because nobody is going to spend the money designing a reactor that might never be built -- the utilities who buy them don't want to wait several years after committing to the project to wait for a finished design, so the engineering firms are selling 50% designs and the utilities are sending those plans to the firms to get fabrication started. They just finished building one, so start by build more of those. > there's a ton of turnover because the job is so difficult due to the poor planning Which is still the scale problem -- it's poor planning because they have no experience doing it. The more you build the more experience people have. > they actually saw negative learning curves on Vogtle 4 -- it actually took them longer to complete much of the same work on the 2nd reactor they're building. COVID hit during Vogtle 4, which is obviously an outlier. > So we "just" need a stable government commitment to spend tens of billions of dollars over several decades. By some estimates the US government pays $20B in subsidies a year to the oil industry, so this isn't even a big ask. But it's also not clear why you inherently need there to be a single buyer. Why can't 10 independent entities all buy reactors of the same design?