China also builds wind, solar, and electrical transmission projects faster and cheaper than Europe. China has lower wages and planners can ignore local objections to infrastructure projects more easily than in Europe. This leads to better outcomes by the numbers but it's not an unmitigated good.

It's not just that. When you build reactors in series, you have economies of scales in term of accumulated expertise, amortising R&D costs, etc. France for instance finished building up its nuclear capacity at the end of the 80s, and every reactor built since has been unique, extremely costly and behind schedule. But the day they will replace their whole estate, the economics will likely be very different.

Of course, given public opinion, that day might never come.

Not saying they’re not, but I’d be curious what measures of reactor quality you’ve seen?

Number of severe incidents divided by number of reactor days?

China has the newest plants in the world: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/age-profile-o...

We don't know how they'll perform as they age. If we calculated quality as you suggest, they would probably win.. but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.

> but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.

That's a strange expectation to have. Ever heard of the bathtub curve ?

In your formula, where do you envision the number of incidents being derived from?

China excels at hiding important information from public view, so I would take their data, and data indirectly sourced from them, with a grain of salt. And oh, by the way, one could say the same about the nuclear industry and its captured regulatory bodies in general as well.

That is true, which is why I specifically mentioned "severe" incidents - even if less severe stuff happens and is hushed up, it's impossible to keep radioactive particles blowing across the globe quiet, so we'd surely know of those.

Wouldn't you want to normalize by Joules produced instead of by reactor days?