In contrast, the only real alternative to air travel for high speed transportation between Northern and Southern CA is high speed rail. The "Hyperloop" has been exposed (charitably) as a failed concept, and personal vehicle travel (even electrified) is not an equivalent to HSR in a state as big as CA.
None of that is to say that the CA HSR project has been well planned/executed or that the costs have been well estimated. But that doesn't obviate the need for high speed ground transport in the state.
1. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... (pages 2 and 31)
They took the cost to build Vogtle, which is one of the most or even the most expensive outlier in terms of time/cost overruns of all time, and decided to make that the baseline for "the cost of nuclear power".
When the average time to build a nuclear reactor in the world has consistently been around 7.5 years. For the last 50 years, and also for the ones that came online in 2022, lest you think these were just the bygone good old days.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
Time to construct a nuclear plant takes on average 7.5 years, a number that hasn't really budged in the last 50 years.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-constructi...
And since financing (i.e. interest) is the primary cost of nuclear (~50%), time is money.
Hinkley and Flamanville are examples of the EPR, a brand new reactor type that is both at the start of its learning curve, always problematic, and also apparently a design that is particularly difficult to build. And both Europe and the US haven't really built any nuclear plants for quite a long time, so the know-how to build them is just not there. Oh, and the regulators sometimes change regulations after parts of the plants have been built so they have to tear down what they have built and start again.
These are obviously all solvable problems, and mostly solvable by just building more. The problem is that we didn't build enough. Just build more.
So what better estimate would you suggest? What nuclear power plants where built in the last decade or so, for how much do they sell their power? How big will their decomissioning costs be per MWh?
Please support your claim.
We were talking about cost, and cost is directly proportional to construction time because financing (interest) is the primary cost of nuclear power plant construction.
I’m still waiting for better cost estimates than what Lazard gives.
Take the Vogtle-3 time, divide by average time to construct a nuclear reactor.
Apply factor to Lazard "estimate".
Vogtle was only delayed by 25%, 2.5 years? I thought it was such a disaster and this proved nuclear doesn't work?
Now it's all good?
This says the delay was 7 years:
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-nuclear-power-plant-vogtl...
Oh, and the plant will still be cost effective, apparently, even with those delays.
Oh, and the solar numbers include sufficient batter storage? I saw something about 4h for half the capacity on some of the graphs. Most didn't explain at all.
https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP193%20TR%20CANE...
https://www.enr.com/articles/55774-oxford-professors-latest-...
California has a referendum system. That so few referendums focus on cutting costs says something about its voters’ priorities.
On the other hand, the state is losing population on an absolute basis (and relatively even more so against a backdrop of national growth). So some folks are voting with their feet. I'm eagerly awaiting the day when I'm free enough to do the same.
I’m arguing the opposite. The voters have the tools to oppose the state government’s size. That they don’t use them signals support in broad terms.
One key difference that I do like about the CA referendum process is that laws passed by referendum in California are equal to the state constitution and require 2/3 supermajority in state congress to modify or change, just like the state constitution itself. This avoids many attempts by legislature to foil or spoil the will of the voters’ referendums, in contrast to other state referendum processes which are only considered a law passed by other means and are usually able to be modified by simple majority.
A) Idealistic voters with little interest in detail or executions.
B) Hard working state employees executing in an ineffective way because they are working on over constrained problems with conflicting and sometime impossible goals.
C) A number of opportunists that take advantage of poor rulemaking and bureaucratic disorganization.
For what it is worth, I dont think corruption is a major driver of problems, but bad policy detached from the practical considerations.
One simple example is SF parks maintenance:
The city wants to keep invasive species out, so it has staff to remove them. The city also believes in livable wages, so the workers make >100K. Residents dont like pesticides, so the workers must hand weed. Hand weeding doesnt work, so the City periodically pays outside consultants to come in and take care of the invasives (with pesticides and low paid workers).
These small examples are extremely frustrating as a tax payer. What is the solution to these examples, or does one just try to ignore it as a price of living in that society?
One consideration is having a broader tax base so that voters have more skin in the game.
For example, taxes in Houston are less progressive than SF, but SF city budget per resident is more than 500% that of Huston.
The $1.7M public toilet was a painful example showing how far off the rails we are. Should auditors and controllers have some teeth? What would they be?