For a novel build of a barely finished design.
4.5 years is probably the shortest time it took to build a CP (900MW) reactor at the height of France's reactor-building frenzy (St-Laurent-B-1 construction started in May 1976 and ended in January 1981, 4 years and 8 months).
The next generation (P4) I don't think any took less than 6 years to build, and the embattled N4 generation immediately preceding the EPR the first reactor (Chooz 1, of only 4) had a build time of 12 years (and 7 months), the last (and fastest), Civaux 2, being completed in a "mere" 8 ( and 8 months).
And the N4 had and still has significant teething issues: soon after they were put into production they suffered from leaks in cooling pipes leading to all 4 being stopped for 10 months, and at the 10 years revision in 2021 extensive stress corrosion cracking of the primary circuit was discovered, all the N4s have been stopped and the last news are they won't be restarted until 2023.
The difficulty is that both military reactors and commercial power reactors have evolved considerably since their initial branch point. Commercial power reactors provide base load (run at full power) for a year or two and then get refueled. Military reactors now last the life of the ship without refueling at all, but are optimized for propulsion's variable demands.
I would like to see comparisons to other large construction projects too. The US is really really bad at large construction projects, but European construction seems a lot better.
Consulting the current list of nuclear power plants under construction around the world by a pro-nuclear power group here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
I see the following as the only ones still under construction in all of Europe (not counting Belarus and Russia): 1) Mochovce 3 in Slovakia. Construction started November 2008, originally scheduled to complete in 2012, now hopefully complete later this year, so 15 years total, 10 years late. 2) Flamenville 3 in France. Construction started in 2007, originally scheduled to complete in 2012. Hopefully complete in 2023, so 16 years later, 11 years late. 3) Mochovce 4 in Slovakia. Construction started November 2008, original scheduled to complete in 2013, now hopefully complete in 2023, so 16 years total, 10 years late. 4,5) Hinkley Point C1 and C2 in the UK. Construction started in roughly 2008, originally expected to be online 2022 or so ("early 2020s" is the best I can find with Google now, and that's for both C1 and C2 to be online). Now C1 is expected to be complete in 2027, and C2 in 2028. So 19-20 years total, 6 years late.
(The US has two reactors on the list, Vogtle 3 and 4, started in 2009, originally expected to finish in 2016 and 2017, now expected to finish in 2023.)
I suspect that Europe's success in building rapid transit, compared to America, is due to the fact that they were continuously building such systems, whereas the US largely hasn't, so there is no cohort of engineers and workers who learned-by-doing and get better over time. But in nuclear, those workers seem to have gone in Europe as well- you can see from this 2020 chart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#/media...) that France built almost all of their reactors in a giant lump between 1970 and 1983, built a few reactors later in the 1980s (presumably late career work from the people who had built so many earlier), and has found building a new reactor to be really hard, e.g. Flamenville 3 is just as big a disaster as Vogtle.
Cherry on top - after producing electricity for about a week, it had to shut down for another 3 months. Then, after ramping up to about 30% of the capacity, it encountered another problem, delaying it for another 5 months. Here we are in June 2022, 17 years later, Olkiluoto 3 provides exactly 0 MW to the Finnish grid
It is true that the 34 CPY reactors, and the 20 P4 reactors, were produced in large enough numbers to create a skilled class of workers and engineers who were deeply experienced with building these reactors, but right now all of those workers are retired.
And honestly, from observation, it appears that rebuilding competence like this is a lot harder than building it in the first place: when you are building the first time everyone- the general public, the regulators, the workers themselves- are more forgiving. When you've lost that capacity and are trying to rebuild it you have expectations set for a mature industry, but the skills aren't there to deliver it.
Unless the situation in the US is really, really REALLY horrible, I doubt that. I don't remember where, but one country is in the process of building a nuclear power plant, that is AFAIK unfinished, but already took way more time and money than originally planned.
Doesn't even have to be nuclear - ask the Internet about Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie or Stuttgart's train station. Having public construction projects overrun their schedules and budgets is a well-honored tradition, at least in Germany, but I suspect our neighbors have similar customs.
One of the points they made in the podcast was similar to TFA's: changes in construction are really expensive and blow things out in costs. A new mayor came in and demanded major changes once construction was underway in Berlin. And then, when people said "this will cause problems" his response was basically "we're Germany, we are the best at planning, building and constructing, of course we can handle this with no problems"...
German satire website Der Postillion (roughly equivalent to The Onion) ran a headline once that Berlin would get a new airport by moving the entire city to some place with an existing airport.
In general, Alon Levy's blog has great articles on this topic and he lives in Berlin https://pedestrianobservations.com/
https://www.postandcourier.com/business/vc_summer_nuclear_pr...
Search for "Georgia recorder vogtle" to get some of the reports from the Georgia construction delays.
the competency is not allowed to spread. there's a thick shroud of secrecy around how all this sophisticated technology comes about.
This is also why semiconductors are so difficult.
Back in the early 20th century the nuclear stuff was secret so the nazis and then the russians would not get it.
Now semiconductors are also closely related to national security stuff (china and taiwan). I find it quite suggestive that most of the tech used to make the semiconductors is owned european companies.
Finally, I have a sensation that in the 18-19th century it was the chemical sciences that were similarly shrouded in secrecy of this sort.
There was a topic here on HN the other day about how there's so little popularization of chemistry... IMO, this is why, the legacy of secrecy so to guarantee competitive industrial advantages still casts its shadow.
I really liked Chemistry but ended up moving into software instead.
The dirty secret is that all factories are hard to build because nobody knows all the details to make them work.
It's that simple.
People bring operative knowledge to bear in the running of a factory. Over time, that knowledge becomes baked into the procedures, equipment, maintenance and people.
This is, in my opinion, something that everybody overlooks about nuclear. Power plants and factories need to evolve and optimize over time to be successful.
Nuclear plants get encased in amber and can't do that. I understand why people don't want to allow that. However, I really think that this inability to evolve will doom any large scale nuclear reactor design. Probably the only way that nuclear becomes successful is very small, semi-sealed power plants as the whole plant evolves at the manufacturing facility rather than at the site.
> I find it quite suggestive that most of the tech used to make the semiconductors is owned european companies.
This is hardly surprising. They're spinouts of the big conglomerates from the 1980s (ASML is from Philips, no?). These conglomerates didn't exist in Japan (maybe--MITI was funding the hell out of things in Japan in the early 1980s so my memory may be off), China, etc. back when this stuff was getting started and spun out.
TSMC is actually the anomaly. It took a very determined effort with a lot of money being shoveled around by the government combined with a disgruntled TI executive of Chinese background and all of his knowledge and contacts to put it all together.
I'm not sure this is the case. Chemistry and geology were both popular with hobbyists (albeit, it seemed to often be aristocratic hobbyists) during that period.
He died of cancer, thyroid cancer of exenguination (bleeding out of your mouth)
My grandmother received a fairly large settlement from the class action lawsuit against GE for exposing engineers to radiation for decades without proper safety...
Sorry to hear about your uncle's experience, a lot of pain came out of that facility.
Also, I dont know if your uncle was part of that suit against GE - but it may be something you want to look up.
I don't have any further info to provide on the subject, my grandfather passed in 1996. My grandmother last year. So I cant ask anyone...
We're not talking about a bracket here. Or an O-ring. When was the last time something as stupid as an O-ring decided the fate of... oh, never mind.
That's simply a bending of the rules for economic reasons. And it is one of the main reasons for me to oppose nuclear: the fact that people will be people and that at the root of every one of those disaster and near disasters there was someone who thought they could get away with something. We are ill equipped to deal with this kind of responsibility, especially across a timeframe measures in decades.
At the same time I would love to see us solve the climate change problem, and I recognize that we will likely have a nuclear component in there. But it will have to be done by the book or we'll end up regretting it - again.
If we're going to start out with the normalization of deviance on the #1 critical component of a reactor then I think we are on the wrong path:
https://becht.com/becht-blog/entry/normalization-of-deviance...
When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts. The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped.
Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a-kind articles with unique requirements. It's how bridges and roads get built, for example.
With nuclear, they have special teams that do nothing but manage every type of risk you could ever think of for every piece of nuclear material in the country. It's very advanced, and many industries are trying to use those techniques themselves now.
Nobody is normalizing or bending anything. Every potential problem is thoroughly addressed on an individual basis. There is no deviance from the safety requirements. Nuclear is decades ahead of every other field in terms of risk management.
The stated defect has effects that can only be properly ascertained by destructive testing and since the whole point was that there was only one of these that leaves a large part of the end result in the realm of 'hope' and 'belief', neither of which are part of any materials science course that I'm familiar with. The knock on effect of changing the vessel specs would essentially require a complete rework unless the reactor were de-rated in either safety, generation capacity or lifespan. And because 'safety' is the only one that doesn't show up in the books that's where my worry would be.
'special teams' don't amount to much, we've had special teams all along and a long series of fuck ups. This is exactly the problem.
At one point I learned there were standard tombs describing (presumably often unexpected) Nuclear Plant Phenomenology.
This kind of thinking is what brought down the spaceshuttle. Three Mile Island (US), Windscale (UK), Chernobyl (Then USSR, now Ukraine) and Fukushima (Japan) all had the very best teams assigned to their design, construction and operations and yet each of those had a major accident.
There isn't anything fabricated about these facts so you can extend your appeal to authority but I'm just not buying it: people will always be people and the day that you start bending the rules on the design requirements is the day that I bow out. Obviously that isn't going to move the needle but it is exactly why I don't trust the nuclear industry: way too much did not go according to plan even if it always was with the best of intentions. And that's before we get into non-proliferation, waste and other considerations.
Trust has to be earned.
Also, you should probably lay off the personal attacks.
> When they accept an expensive out-of-spec part, it's because they can safely redesign the less expensive parts.
'They' presumably being the engineers, and because they are engineers it is automatically assumed that the less expensive parts can always be redesigned. But in the case of a reactor vessel it isn't clear at all how and if that is even possible without compromising on something that apparently originally wasn't to be compromised on. And because the nuclear industry isn't exactly known for their transparency when it comes to such defects it is hard to have visibility on whether what is now no longer the original design really is as safe as what went before.
I think we can agree on at least this simple fact: if the original spec was presumed to be optimal and the new change is still a costly one that there is some pressure to allow a solution to pass that maximizes the economic equation, in this case to redesign the rest of the parts that closely interact with the part that is out of spec. But because the interaction with the reactor vessel is one that is closely based on the operating parameters of the complex as a whole and funds are limited there will be pressure on to compromise. In your world such a compromise would never happen. In mine there is ample evidence that it is and I highly doubt that the nuclear industry is exempt from such pressure to compromise.
The very fact that they did not simply demand a vessel made to spec spells out exactly such a compromise.
> The only thing that hurts is their long-term profitability because it'll be less efficient than they hoped.
That is exactly where the pressure comes from any further compromise will limit that efficiency and hence the profitability (including subsidies) of the plant. So there is pressure to minimize the costs of such a redesign to ensure that the economic damage is limited. The question whether or not that is possible within the original safety margins is an open one, and for at least one reactor I'm aware that safety margins were exceeded on more than one occasion and yet the plant remained open, simply because of a continuous redefinition of what was deemed to still be acceptable. Something that in your world, again, likely is an impossibility:
https://www.laka.org/nieuws/2015/wat-met-het-scheurtjesonder...
Just one example, there are many more (sorry, this one is in Dutch, it is about the plants that I know most about). So there is clear evidence (at least, clear enough to me) of this 'normalization of deviation' that you claim does not exist in this context.
> Big, expensive parts are always treated as one-of-a-kind articles with unique requirements. It's how bridges and roads get built, for example.
Indeed. And bridges never collapse and roads never have problems... In terms of our knowledge about bridges we are still learning new things. Not that long ago that a completely safe and well designed bridge ended up with a whole slew of patches to deal with various resonances in the steel cabling that held up the bridge when the wind was strumming those cables causing massive deflection of the bridge deck, far in excess of what the design originally allowed.
Engineering complex, one-off installations is hard. Reliability and reproduction go hand in hand, only by iteration over a design across many cycles and learning from various defects and errors does engineering progress. It's not just a matter of plugging numbers into formulas, there is a significant amount of feedback from the field about how the assumptions hold up that drives engineering forward and in the case of a one off design that loop doesn't exist. If there is only one reactor vessel and it does not end up being to spec the real effects of that change won't be known until the reactor is decommissioned. Until then we're on ice that we hope is thick enough but that we can not be 100% sure of, see that article linked above. There too engineers ended up being quite surprised at their findings when analyzing the reactor after it had been in service for a while.
> With nuclear, they have special teams that do nothing but manage every type of risk you could ever think of for every piece of nuclear material in the country. > It's very advanced, and many industries are trying to use those techniques themselves now.
This is again a claim that essentially creates an elevated class of engineers who are above making mistakes and who lead the way in ways that I can only assume is through magic. Because in my world engineers do make mistakes, they miss elements in their risk assessment and they make mistakes in their assumptions and sometimes even in the design itself.
But for a one off reactor vessel with a material defect there is no 'plan B', the job could not be called off, so instead of scrapping this vessel and getting one that was built to spec we now work on a cascade of changes. And your claim essentially is that because all these people are so good at what they are doing that they can make this all work without further consequence other than some financial adjustments. My claim is that this isn't a bolt or some other simple part of the reactor and that the safety implications of such a change will not be known until either one of two things happen: the reactor serves out its lifespan, is decommissioned and after analysis of the vessel it is proven that there was no material difference between this one and the one that they originally wanted to have. Or we do find such a difference and in that case we conclude that we were lucky. The third alternative we'll leave unspoken.
> Nobody is normalizing or bending anything.
I don't think you realize that you've essentially made the case for doing just that far more eloquently than I ever could: you are normalizing the deviation by making the claim that it can always be done safely. But how do you know this? In the long, long chain from the QA inspector that faulted the vessel, to the recommendations, to the engineers that redesigned the other parts to the management surely there is pressure from above to solve this, just like there was pressure on NASA administrators to launch and that pressure worked its way downward. And I fail to see the difference between rocket scientists and nuclear power plant engineers. Both are very capable people with very extensive backgrounds in the fields that they are operating in. And if it was just the scientists I'm pretty sure they would have ordered a new vessel and left it at that.
But because there is a political element to this (and politics driven by financial considerations at that) you end up with the exact environment that can lead to this thing called 'normalization of deviation' and that way accidents can and do happen. There is a mountain of evidence for this and I'm not going to close my eyes to that on your say-so. And what goes for the USA may not hold for other countries with less capital and possibly even higher pressures on the management to deliver.
> Every potential problem is thoroughly addressed on an individual basis.
I'm sure it is. Just like in aviation, right? And of course the regulators are not in bed with the likes of GE.
> There is no deviance from the safety requirements.
Blanket unsourced statement. How can you make this claim with such certainty?
My claim is that safety requirements are violated routinely, by people who believe that they are in control of the situation and who have the best of intentions. They're people, after all. And I do have some evidence for my claim:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-nuclear-power-plants-safe...
> Nuclear is decades ahead of every other field in terms of risk management.
That is not a reason to be super happy about nuclear, but it is a source of worry for all these other fields. And this is probably one of the few things where we agree: that risk management is a field that is still very much under appreciated. And I see that reflected in my practice almost every week.
As a general comment, you still jump to many exaggerated conclusions apparently without seeking to understand. For example, your conclusion about an elevated class of engineers that use magic, which you explicitly said is an assumption.
Having worked with these processes and techniques myself for many years in other industries, I know from daily firsthand experience that this is not at all a fair characterization. What they do is one piece of one layer of defense. One aspect of their job is to say no until they cannot say no anymore. The new techniques are for finding more things to say no about.
However, you erroneously concluded that they must be concocting new ways to justify increasingly risky behavior. If you still feel this to be true, the burden of proof has firmly shifted back to you, for the purpose of this discussion. To be clear, I don't expect you to trust me for the purpose of changing your own opinion.
I don't have time to address everything you've written. Maybe the next thing to reflect on is what out-of-spec truly means and implies. On one hand, you're afraid of cost pressure. But on the other hand, you want to create larger cost pressure through a rigid system of rules that you alone adhere to. Something to consider revisiting yourself.
As for general concerns about nuclear, I think the public messaging needs to improve before a real discussion can happen about accepting new developments. Old technologies and risks still dominate the psyche, and new technologies are varied with different concerns from each other.
Nuclear engineers, while possible made of different stuff than your average bridge-and-road engineers are not exempt from such pressures, and examples that prove this abound.
Imagine you write software for rabbit-mq. But then you get a requirements change to use zero-mq for whatever reason. Is that deviance? Have you normalized it? No, and no.
Deviance is when you're dropping messages in production when you shouldn't. Normalizing is when you ignore it because "it's usually fine".
You're probably thinking that my analogy doesn't work because changing software libraries is different than accepting an out of spec part. But why? If it's out of spec, it's a different part. You can make a spec around that part and design to it all the same. Just because it wasn't your first choice doesn't mean it's dangerous.
The next pile of reactors down the coast did not melt down, solely on the strength of a single engineer who succeeded, with enormous difficulty, in upholding standards management objected to, but that he knew were essential. Without him, there would now be two major uninhabitable areas there. He must have known Fukushima would melt down, and must have wanted it held to the same standard as his, but lacked authority to extend his standard so far.
Then why would remaking the part be any better than redesigning the system?
Unfortunately, UAE is also building PV that will be producing at $0.013/kWh. And since they're still burning gas for most of their power, every kWh from solar goes straight to reducing the overall cost and CO2 emission, five times cheaper than the NPPs will.
> The only country where the costs of nuclear plant construction seem to have steadily decreased is South Korea:
> The fact that South Korea is the only country to exhibit this trend has led some experts to speculate that the cost data (which comes directly from the utility and hasn’t been independently audited) has been manipulated and we shouldn’t draw conclusions from it.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1915_%C3%87anakkale_Bridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Khalifa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan%E2%80%93Cavite_Interlin...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
See figure 12 for a quick overview. And from the introduction: "In contrast to the rapid cost escalation that characterized nuclear construction in the United States, we find evidence of much milder cost escalation in many countries, including absolute cost declines in some countries and specific eras. Our new findings suggest that there is no inherent cost escalation trend associated with nuclear technology."
That countries like Japan and Korea have similar absolute costs as India which has a 4-5x lower PPP adjusted GDP per capita suggests that the price for labor for nuclear power plant construction is globally set (relatively few qualified engineers who can demand a high price), or India uses a lot more labor, or a combination of both.
In other words, very similar to what happened in the US in response to Three Mile Island: after a scary nuclear incident there was a lengthy pause in nuclear construction which meant that all of the skills and learning-by-doing that had accumulated up to that point went away, and starting again would be significantly more expensive and subject to massive schedule and cost overruns.
Economies of scale generally exist, but it’s not magic. A large fraction of construction costs for nuclear power plants is very similar to other structures. A high pressure steam pipe is a high pressure steam pipe and people are constantly building structures using them.
By doing international standardization and coordination in ways similar to the aircraft industry, the same should be possible for the nuclear power industry.
It should be possible to consolidate most of global production down to a handful of companies (like Boing and Airbus), with a forest of subcontractors in the same way that was done for airliners, and achieve similar economies of scale.
Successful designs could be re-used over a period of 20 years or more, with only minor modernizations of things like electronics, like the Airbus A320 or Boing 747.
Ideally, we should have done this in 1980, but even if we start today, nuclear can provide a lot of energy at very competitive prices in the next 60-100 years. By then, we should have fusion or the ability to build energy storage cheeply enough to make renewables (probably solar) competitive.
Finished airplanes can transport itself by flying. This advantage is particular to aircraft industry and probably can't be copied by other industries. Finished buildings can't transport itself.
Most are things like reactor equipment, turbine equipment and electrical equipment. I'd bet most of that could be built in a central factory, and then shipped to the site.
In fact, when comparing to air travel costs, the reactor buildings can be compared to the airports.
Starting nuke construction now would just be kicking the can down the road again.
Economies of scale is more of a fixed saving on top. This may have helped take the cost per kwh of solar from $10 to $3, but the scientific development was what made it possible to go to $0.1.
In any case, PV prices are already very low. We are reaching a point where installation and maintaince are becoming limiting factors, and where storage is becoming the primary bottleneck.
Development in storage (batteries and hydrogen) already has so much momentum that building out some nuclear power would not threaten it.
New PV tech, like perovskites, might carry prices down further once the learning curve for Si levels off, but we are not there yet.
There is no "storage bottleneck". We just don't have anywhere near enough renewable generating capacity to justify diverting capital from expanding it to building storage. Diverting capital to boutique nukes, and to coal while we wait a decade or two for the nukes, would be far, far worse than that.
When we do start building out storage, vanishingly little of it will be batteries.
Why yes everyone should consolidate global production of _nuclear power plants_ to a handful of companies probably based in the Western world.
Imagine if there were 200 operating systems for phones, instead of 2? How would corporations know which were safe enough to install 2-factor auth on?
Imagine if there were 200 suppliers of x86 cpu's, all with small differences in features? How would we build safe software for those?
Consolidation to a few vendors (but more than 1) is a huge benefit for both costs and safety.
And there is absolutely no reason these companies need to be "Western", unless you include Korea, Japan, Taiwan and India in the "Western World".
China would probably have one such company, but would perhaps only be trusted by their allies, just like US companies would probably not be allowed such infra in China or Russia.
The old designs are dangerous, expensive, and wasteful. The regulatory, economic, and political environment that resulted in their design ultimately resulted in reactors run without proper controls, supervision, or long term safety. The resulting waste was not properly considered from a life cycle perspective.
Disclaimer: I'm not a nuclear expert, but man I loved those LFTR presentations. What really appeals to me about LFTR is the inherent safety, the near-full use of fuel, and the scalability. I understand there are challenges for the materials and containment, but I believe the smaller size of the reactor can lend itself to replacement and manufacturing.
So a "clean slate" with new people, regulations, standards, expectations, computer simulation, and lifecycle planning would do nuclear a huge bonus.
But ultimately it doesn't matter. It won't be price competitive with wind/solar and can't even target a 10-year price point with the wind/solar improvement curves. Same issue the fusion story on the front page faces.
Let's continue active research, but commercialization is a waste of time and money right now. When wind/solar stabilize their cost curves, then nuclear (or fusion) will have something to target commercially. IF they can get there.
I don't think that's a fair claim, considering "Part I" is in the title.
I don't mean to say it would be trivial but it seems like you could do the whole thing for a couple billion USD a year.
Even that did not prevent Fukushima. Never mind Chernobyl.
It's a shame the idiotic "green" movement after chernobyl is rather annoying that it has set energy production in developed nations back ~50 years and caused so much climate damage in the mean time... but hey 'radioactive waste is corporate greed maaannnn'.....
What also seems true is that you can't trust a company to run them properly, no matter the regulations and audits. TEPCO showed that. From people I know who've dealt with the nuclear industry, there is a strong contempt of regulation in sentiment/culture, likely due to the annoyances and perceived costs.
This contempt however breeds a long term apathy towards safety and maintenance. It's human nature.
There are reactor designs that are inherently meltdown proof (LFTR) and use almost all their nuclear fuel (LFTR) and can, I believe, breed old nuclear waste into usable fuel (LFTR). They scale down to small closet sizes (LFTR) and so can be more economically flexible. I believe pebble bed and others can do similar things. LFTR allegedly can be designed to be proliferation resistant, although I've seen opposing views from much better educated people.
But the LFTR goals should be the standard of the nuclear industry for next-gen. Not these massive solid rod huge dome boondoggle-prone eyesores.
How many people died again?
We can do a lot better, but I think we'd be worse off if we hadn't built any of those plants at all.
Nuclear proponents (I'm a nuclear proponent) that handwave away such dangers are exactly who I'm talking about from the "old guard", and the people that the greens were correct about: the people who need to die off/retire/disappear (by attrition), whose lax view of nuclear safety and who politically killed the LFTR in preference for the solid fuel design that could ALSO produce nuclear weapons. Good riddance.
LFTR has given the blueprint for a next-gen reactor: use all the fuel, inherent meltdown protection via the plug, proliferation reduction. Solid fuel reactors are not safe
> It is very hard to do tracebacks of cancer to nuclear events.
Tracebacks are hard but we can do estimates. When I look those up I see numbers like "130".
And the amount of fossil fuel usage that greater energy production from nuclear sources would have curbed would have saved thousands of lives via reduced air pollution, particularly from coal usage, without coming at the expense of high energy prices, that increase mortality among the poorest segments of the population, that simply capping energy usage would have brought about.
So I disagree the mainstream environmental movement, that opposed the nuclear industry, got it right. I think they got it totally wrong, as any populist movement, that is heavy on simple narratives and ideology, and light on science, is bound to be, when it weighs in on extremely complex large-scale issues.
What we do know is that if solar PV had got the subsidies in the '80s it finally got from China the '00s, PV prices in the '90s would have been where they are now, and we would today be well along toward a fully renewable and radically cheaper energy infrastructure today without looming imminent climate catastrophe. Nobody would be hyping dodgy super-expensive nukes. We probably would have avoided the whole Iraq fiasco besides.
But here we are.
Between the 60s and 80s, there were many nuclear reactors projects which allowed an industry to develop and get better at it.
But since the 80s, there was comparatively very few new reactors built for over 20-30 years. The workforce that had the skills and knowledge related to actually building nuclear plants had mostly retired and their replacement had only theoretical knowledge and no actual experience. This makes building new reactor much harder than it should be.
The embattled EPR project at Flammanville is an exemple of that: the specialised company that was hired to forge the nuclear vessel were simply unable to build to spec and a defective critical piece was delivered, creating delays and cost increases. In the end, they even had to use it anyway as it was not economically feasible to simply have another one made.