Re:The booming business of knitting together the world’s ele...
by pfdietz on Monday October 18, 2021 @06:29AM
(#28903990)
The cancellation of new nuclear power plants in the US was overwhelmingly due to economics. In the first nuclear buildout, reactors came in more expensive than promised, demand growth slowed, and then the grids were opened to non-utility generators. This happened again more recently with the nuclear renaissance: projected demand growth again failed to materialize, reactor construction was more expensive than promised (Watts Bar 2, V.C. Summer, Vogtle), and large quantities of fracked gas became available.
> Those 5580 were 1700 more than planned. It's like saying: I can use my car two months a year due to maintenance and being fine with it not working for a third month.
Welcome to the real world of industrial processes, these aren't cars. Maintenance are run on tight schedules[1], so there can easily be delays (this isn't specific to nuclear though, you'd find delays during maintenance for every kind of electric production site). Also, small problems happen all the time, and because of nuclear's super high safety requirements, when those small things happen, you stop the reactor and fix it.
BTW, around one third of those 1700 days came from small issues at Fessenheim that EDF decided not to fix and keep the reactor off because the plant was planned for closure by the end of the year. You're not gonna fix you car if you know it's gonna be seized soon right?
[1] mostly because like in every business, project manager are like “it's late: workers were lazy. It's dine before the deadline: we gave them too much time”.