Reading some of Jeremy Leggett's analysis of nuclear in the region, notably Flamanville and Hinkley, is highly enlightening.
From inability to plan or produce sufficiently high quality components, and then challenges getting them into place without damaging them, low quality work being undertaken in the construction process [1], government hiding details of contractual arrangements, a consistent (and predicted) drop in the price of power before and through the lives of these projects, industry players being painted into a corner where they must [try to] grow their business despite the above [2], combined with a surfeit of hubris all round.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/10/edf-warns-o...
[2] https://jeremyleggett.net/2016/06/03/the-nuclear-white-eleph...
You have literally nothing in your hands but it still won't stop you from blaming the government (which blindly throws money on it) and "environmentalists" (which obviously failed or those projects would not have started).
This is hilarious.
Every manufactured object has an insanely long and convoluted dependency chain, where each link is subject to disappearance due to factors completely out of your control. Especially objects that require special or unusual parts.
Then there's actually building the thing, which can go wrong for a million reasons before you've even reached the grand and rolling lands of human error.
"However, the BBC understands that the fact Sizewell C is a carbon copy of Hinkley - which has seen work on a second reactor there completed 30% more quickly than the first - is thought to have substantially mitigated that risk."
It sounds like it should be pretty easy to budget for this plant. Plans are allowed to include a 20% "we don't know what this is going to be spent on but something will come up" for surprises.
And yet, renewable projects typically come in within 10% of the contracted price.
The modular nature of renewables also allows them to be much more resilient in the face of component failure, or in face of construction errors (with the exception of common mode design failures). This means they can be installed with less skilled labor that makes more mistakes.
Renewable fields are akin to server farms w. large numbers of replaceable blades. Nuclear plants are like mainframes.
[1] https://omegataupodcast.net/181-why-megaprojects-fail-and-wh...
The reason why is important though. Is it because of:
1) Political issues, where the government has set up incentives for the builder to lie?
2) Social issues, where environmentalists attack the project to drive up costs?
It seems unbelievable to me that nuclear plant planners are unable to plan because ... dunno, maybe they hear nuclear and lose the ability to add numbers. There has to be something else going on. Planning is relatively easy once there are 1-2 historical projects to look at.
My experience with energy markets is governments proactively screw them up for reasons I cannot discern. For some reason guaranteed profits is a common standard in Australia which for the life of me I do not understand. Which idiot thinks that is clever? The UK might be doing something similarly stupid.