Re:How safe are nuclear power plants?
by AstralStorm on Wednesday August 17, 2022 @12:18AM
(#32492291)
Indeed, China manages to build new reactors at relatively low cost with no problems these days.
Honeymoon phase. Russia had theirs also.
It's not a honeymoon phase. It's scale and preserving experience. The first reactors built in the 1950s we're actually pretty bad on a dollar to power ratio. But experience and economies of scale drove prices down in the 1960s and 1970s. When you contract for a limited run of, say, 4 steam generators [1] it's more expensive than a run of 80 of them. Nuclear plants in this period averaged ~2 billion dollars per gigawatt of capacity (and remember that's at a >90% capacity factor).
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_pow...
This simply isn’t true. A substantial amount of costs are that every single reactor must be approved as if it’s a brand new design. This is after fighting for 10 years or more for the rights to build it.