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A comment on Nuclear Power in France. Parent comment

Re:Nuclear Power in France by _ph_ on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:22PM (#28842410)
France isn't reducing the capacity as a targetted policy but out of necessity. They have 58 nuclear power plants, most of them quite old (before 80ies). To maintain the current level, they would have to be replaced not too far in the future, but currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and both late and way over budget. So there currently is no route in maintaining the current capacity. Consequently politics has to come up with a roadmap which relies less on nuclear power.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by kspacewalk2 on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:27PM (#28842480)
Consciously deciding to not replace capacity when the need for replacement is known decades in advance is a targeted policy.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by _ph_ on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:48PM (#28842715)
Maybe I have not made that point clear enough in my post: currently they are failing to build replacement plants at a cost at which they could replace all of the existing reactors. Unless they can come up with an entirely new design which considerably cuts cost compared to what is considered a "current design" right now, there will be a reduction in capacity.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by concordDance on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @03:06PM (#28843760)
Nuclear being staggeringly overregulated is the reason for the high costs. If we put the same price on lives lost to car accidents as we do to lives lost in nuclear accidents (which some basic back of envelope calculations using old reactor construction costs and lives lost in nuclear accidents reveals to be well over a billion dollars per life) none of us would drive.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by _ph_ on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @04:50PM (#28844902)
If you consider the possible extend of a major accident - whole southern Germany could become contaminated and tens of million of people could loose their homestead - a certain emphasis on safety is welcome.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by the8472 on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:27PM (#28843239)
Building them in series tends to make per-unit cost come down.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by it_citizen on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @05:15PM (#28845176)
Surprisingly, experience has shown that building more nuclear plants, even standardized, don't make them cheaper to build but more expensive.

2010: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

2020: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

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Re:Nuclear Power in France by the8472 on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @06:10PM (#28845671)
In the 2020 article two of the 3 reasons listed are changes, regulation and design changes. So it's not really series-production of a single model.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by _ph_ on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:49PM (#28843523)
Yes, that would be to expect. But to determine the feasibility and calculate possible savings with further units, one would have to finish the first of the series first.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by worrycue on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:34PM (#28842552)
> currently only 1 or 2 new reactors are under construction and both late and way over budget.

So in a few decades France has forgotten how to build reactors on time and in an affordable way?

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Re:Nuclear Power in France by pydry on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:52PM (#28842784)
It's never been cheap. It's previously been heavily subsidized, often as a means to maintaining a domestic nuclear economy as a means of maintaining nuclear arsenals.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by pas on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:58PM (#28843654)
It's not surprising at all.

Everything has been debundled, privatized, consolidated, streamlined, modernized. This is not "bad" in itself, but doing big public projects this way is not efficient, because this way of organization needs big volume to become efficient.

Basically we need to order 100+ reactors to get them cheap and fast. (And we need to have them use truly standardized interchangeable (modular) components. Naturally, modularity has an overhead, but it pays off if there's a long term for it to pay off. As long as we only build a few plants treating each of them as different allows for some local optimizations, but that is against large volume manufacturing, maintenance, etc.)

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Re:Nuclear Power in France by _ph_ on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @01:48PM (#28842730)
As have all western countries. Building a new nuclear power plant at the safety level one would expect today is hugely expensive.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by whimsicalism on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:42PM (#28843430)
South Korea hasn't forgotten. They have gotten the costs down quite a bit.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by _ph_ on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:48PM (#28843509)
How far?
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by whimsicalism on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @05:10PM (#28845132)
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u...

This has some useful charts.

It shows that nuclear still has economy of scale to improve, if we give it the chance.

The big difficulty for nuclear is public pressure/fear of accidents. People are much more afraid of "big scary nuclear accident" vs. probabilistic deaths caused by air pollution, even if the deaths from the latter is in the tens of thousands and the former is in the dozens.

That fear of public/policy backlash makes raising capital in order to actually benefit from those economics of scale very difficult.

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Re:Nuclear Power in France by michael1999 on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @03:13PM (#28843837)
Booms generate an educated cohort. A stalled boom freezes this now-oversized cohort in place, and leaves no job openings for the next generation. Then, a generation later, retirement can leave an industry incapable of past glories.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by galvin on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @04:48PM (#28844876)
Most reactors in France are 1st gen whereas the new one being built is 3rd gen and the first of its kind in France. The increased safety has made construction more complicated than previous reactors but a lot of those issues are being worked out so future reactors would probably be built more quickly and cost efficiently.
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by mwilliaams on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @04:33PM (#28844731)
Projects taking significantly longer and costing significantly more seems to be a common theme these days. See any U.S. military project…
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Re:Nuclear Power in France by ohgodplsno on Tuesday October 12, 2021 @02:21PM (#28843173)
Not really. While it is true that we have not been building nuclear reactors in the last 40 years (and that, therefore, all knowledge is basically lost, leading to the insane delays we're seeing in the EPR), this is mostly a political maneuver to win the ecologist vote. Hollande closing down Fessenheim when it was good for an additional 20 years at the very least is a prime example of the clownery at the head of this country.
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