Listening to Jigar Shah, head of the DOE loans program, indicated part of the reason it's so expensive to build NPPs is that each nuclear power plant is a bespoke operation and requires a ton of custom work, planning and certification, etc. The suggestion he made was to create a basic design that you can just copy-paste where suitable, allowing you to leverage economics of scale. This would seem at least at first glance to align with the recommendations in the article.
France has sort of done this - they have 56 reactors in operation all based on the same 3 basic designs[1]. It's pretty incredible how quickly the plants were designed, tested, and built. Over a span of 15 years they brought 56 reactors online[2] - in the US we'd be lucky to build and commission a single reactor in that time span.
The regulatory ratchet, headline fear and a complete refusal to consider having a $/QALY number is the reason for the insane costs. Nuclear power is the most over regulated industry in the world, with many safety measures giving returns of less than a single quality adjusted life year per billion dollars! (You can get this number simply by comparing the accident rate and QALY costs of 1970s reactors to modern ones)
Yeah, that's what TFA is about. People thought about it, but it turns out it doesn't matter, because regulatory requirements were a moving target and were applied retroactively to any project not yet finished.
This quote sums it up nicely:
> It doesn’t matter how standardized your design is if you end up needing to change it on every project to meet new requirements.
Yeah, but how can that happen in a changing regulatory environment? From the article it seems to me that even if you had built a plant and loved the design, it probably wouldn't be legal to build another one just like it a few years down the road. The author says that part of the reason for cost overruns is that the rules change even after construction has begun.
The way to build standardized nuclear plants is for the reactor maker to build merchant plants, operate them, and sell the output into competitive power markets. It's like SpaceX building and operating their own vehicles, and how many renewable and natural gas power plants work.
It's just that no such merchant nuclear plant has ever been built anywhere. There's a serious lack of dog food here.
Getting the design certified and using that again is certainly a way of saving cost. Any regulator worth their salt would however still have to do the on the ground checks (e.g. if the right materials are used etc).
I think every HN user who programs knows that the process of copy-pasting comes with it's own danger. You are not automatically getting a working thing if the context you are pasting into differs ever so slightly.
If one plans to build a lot of nuclear plants that context might be something you can control. One of the things I would worry about is water and how to cool it.
Last summer most of France's nuclear power plants were switched off because the rivers they use for cooling were dried out. And the presidictions on the climate catastrophe have gotten worse.
You mean maybe like a shipping container sized reactor that is simply stacked (and replaced / defueled for maintenance)?
Like one that can have its liquid fuel removed by just piping?
That's very development was done using a closet-sized reactor that could be easily powered up and powered down so it CAN scale with demand?
Whose design is inherently meltdown-proof?
Which uses almost all its fuel so there's no nuclear waste to transport?
That can breed its fuel from Thorium?
The time to invest in this was 20 years ago. Certainly the viability of nuclear missed the boat 10 years ago.
Nuclear will have to wait for solar/wind/battery and other grid levelling alternatives (home solar + storage, EVs-as-grid-batteries) to mature and develop before they have a stable economic target.
Then nuclear needs to figure out how to make that target. I think it is a LFTR, but who knows. I don't think solid fuel rods are the way. Too much waste, too much danger inherent to the fuel packaging.
And seriously, "the institute for progress"? The nuclear industry is so out of touch their marketing and lobbying is 30 years out of date.
That accounts for part of it, but there's a lot of litigation and environmental redtape that slows these things down. Before you can build a nuclear plant, you have to do an environmental impact report. Then somebody can complain, or sue, to stop over something in that environmental impact report. The ability of interest groups to halt nuclear, even green energy, is a bit ridiculous.
I have no problem with this personally. But I fear that nuclear fearmongers would capitalize on this as a possible "worst-case scenario" if we tried to deploy such a plan. Is this thought misguided?
My mother worked for a company that made small cooling fans used in fighter jets and space craft.
She would bring one of the fans home and say “Look! I just sold 10 of these for $1,000,000”
The fans themselves were cheap to manufacture. But they were SO incredibly important that they could NOT fail under any circumstance. (They were mostly fans meant to cool electronic systems, and if they failed, would cause the plane or space craft to explode, literally)
The fans were so expensive because they had to go through so many quality checks to ensure they would sustain every environment imaginable, compounded with the fact that there’s no scale in demand (no one other than Boeing, NASA, etc is going to buy a tiny $100k fan)
Tiny production volume + huge quality requirements/standards = very expensive product.
I assume a similar dynamic applies to many components in a nuclear power plant. Volume is very low and the quality/reliability requirements are very high.
I have a tinfoil hat theory that all of this environmental and safety regulation was amplified heavily by lobbying and/or propaganda efforts from the coal companies. On one hand, you can make the argument that nuclear fuel was the new silent invisible killer on the block (as opposed to coal mining and emissions which were known, but accepted since it had been around for decades) But when I read stuff like this, it seems as if regulation was heavily disproportionately applied to nuclear energy even despite it being a new and unfamiliar danger. Or maybe the coal industry simply was more successful at curbing regulation. After all, it was was a more mature industry financially and politically.
My theory might be speculative and totally off the mark. But when you compare deaths per TWh of energy produced, coal is responsible for almost 3 orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear. So maybe the real question is "how has coal power stayed so cheap?" or "if we tried to make coal power as safe as nuclear, what would it cost?"
Last year a tiny radioactive capsule the size of a fingernail went missing in Australia, when a "safe" storage container the size of a small car failed and allowed it to fall out.
The search to find the capsule cost four million dollars and there were global news stories warning people to avoid the highway the (very, very long) highway the truck had driven down.
In other countries (e.g. Soviet ones) where precautions like that haven't been taken, those capsules have been found after dozens of people caught cancer due to regular exposure to a capsule that just happened to end up near them. Presumably there are more that haven't been found, and those countries just accept a higher rate of cancer than the rest of the world.
The accidents you described didn't come from nuclear power plants. The Western Australian incident was mining equipment. The Goiânia accident happened in Brazil and was medical equipment. The Kramatorsk radiological accident was also mining equipment.
The Australia case is a clear example of misspent money because headlines rule the world.
Those millions of dollars could have saved a dozen lives, while odds are very high that capsule would have not been found by a civilian until after decaying to a harmless level. In the very unlikely event of being found it would likely have killed only one or two people.
Also, I wonder if the US has accumulated know-how to lower the cost of nuclear power plant construction. Korea has continued to build nuclear power plants, and it is clear that it has the know-how to cut costs.
The five European Pressurized Reactors (EPRs) designed by French utility EDF have all suffered unanticipated issues that have led to costly delays and soaring price
Findings of a 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis that found successive iterations of a new nuclear design generally cost more than the original project
Although a pair of Chinese EPRs have been completed and are generating power, one unit was shut down for more than a year because of faulty fuel rods.
Costs and delays have also plagued EPRs in France, the United Kingdom, and Finland, where the completion of the Olkiluoto 3 reactor has been delayed 17 years
For more context: EPRs are all developed by EDF and Framatome. So this could be another factor explaining that they all have issues, rather than their sheer complexity.
It sounds like we could fix basically all of this by having new plant approvals be "sticky", ie, once a project is approved, you can build and operate it with no additional regulatory-imposed changes.
This whole system of retroactively requiring changes made is absurdly costly and it's why we're stuck in terms of building out new capacity. This is not de-regulation, just changing how we regulate this from something that is actively antagonistic to something that is not.
According to the article, "rising labor costs are the bulk of increased construction costs". Yet we are talking about cost increasing by hundreds of percent. The question the article does not really pose is: how much of that labor is actually necessary?
I am reminded of my summer internship installing a computer system in a sewage plant. One of my jobs was testing the connection of the computer system to sensors. I needed a guide to show me where the sensors were located, and then I needed to attach a multimeter to the wires while someone on the computer end sent a signal. So two people needed.
However, there were six of us: The guide. The guy who could open the sensor cover. The guy who could attach the clips to the wires. The guy who read the meter. The guy who made sure each person only did his part of the job. And me. 300% of the required labor, so 300% of the costs.
I'm not contradicting anything about this, but I would be interested to see a comparison between nuclear power plants and OTHER very large projects (the California Bullet Train, anyone? How about the Sydney Opera House?) It seems like they are mostly all getting worse, not better. It doesn't have to be this way. Bent Flyvbjerg, a Danish professor, has a book on this:
- Monocrystaline turbine blades have become required due to their ability to operate at higher temperatures than the melting points of the metals that compose their alloys. The requirement is their efficiency in power production. These are also used in aerospace, but are complex and difficult to produce.
- Common water reactors must contain insanely high pressures, enough to force water to remain liquid at 300°C or higher. This is not inexpensive.
- Molten salt reactors, where deployed, must be composed of alloys resistant to molten (negative) chloride ions and (positive) sodium ions, assuming the fluid chemically disassociates. Alloys that can withstand these conditions are also not inexpensive.
It’s definitely an expense. But this doesn’t fully explain why nuclear is expensive.
-Current nuclear reactors aren’t nearly hot enough to need single crystal turbine blisks. We’re talking on the order of 300°C.
-Coal power plant routinely hit much higher temperatures in supercritical and ultra-supercritical (yes, that’s a real term) steam generators. We don’t have quite as bad a problem building coal power plants.
-We’re not currently building molten salt reactors for power generation.
You didn’t say anything that was wrong. I’m just don’t think this is the reason building reactors is so expensive.
1) in 2050, the world will get its energy almost exclusively from renewable sources, with a combination of batteries, hydrogen, biogas, hydropower (conventional and pumped), and demand management used to cope with variability.
2) Energy, even taking into account transmission and firming costs, will be cheaper than it ever was.
3) Message boards will still be full of arguments over nuclear energy.
Doing back of napkin math (using the numbers I can find) it doesn't seem like nuclear power is expensive to construct - at least compared to solar and wind. Nothing is cost competitive with natural gas and coal - but that's the problem we are trying to solve.
The Topaz Solar Farm in the US has a capacity of 550MW and a construction cost of $2.5b US billion.
That puts it at a cost of $4.5 million per MW capacity (550MW / 2.5b) (adjusted for inflation that's $3.2b USD or $5.8m per MW). It is used at 26% of its capacity which I assume is due to the non dispatchable nature of solar (would likely change if batteries were added - increasing cost).
Assuming a 10 year loan at 3% adds $500m bringing it to $6.7m per MW capacity
The Palo Verde nuclear plant has a capacity of 3937MW and a construction cost of $12.6b USD adjusted for inflation. That puts it at a cost of $3.2m per MW capacity and it was used at 82% of its capacity over its lifetime.
Interest at 3% over 10 years adds 2b to the figure making it $3.7m per MW capacity
Limitations:
This doesn't consider running costs, maintenance or factor how usage capacity affects cost.
Maybe I am missing something, perhaps the running costs of nuclear eclipse the total cost of solar + batteries over 50 years? Maybe the loans granted for nuclear are at a much higher interest rate than those granted for other power projects? Is insurance a factor?
The real problem seems to be lack of standards in manufacturing industry to raise the quality bar across the supply chain to the nuclear levels. If all regular factories of cooling systems and valves and pipes and concretes were operating to meet interoperability and quality standards set by regulatory bodies then the cost of meeting such high quality bar would be amortized over large number of things. Also, the "indirect" costs can be significantly optimized with today's tech – especially with more AI-infused software systems. I think this pattern of the problem is seen in many industries – of lack of regulations for enforcing interoperability requirements and setting quality bar high enough to meet a large number of critical use-cases. We don't build as many big and amazing things anymore, not as much as we used to.
"72% of the cost increase was due to indirect costs, indicating a large increase in expensive professionals such as engineers and managers"
one of the first very tangible direct "Macro" effects of the rise of non-contributing b.s jobs (Consulting, Life Coaches, Influencers, Day Trading and everything else under the 4 hour week mantra).
I've always wondered what are the big picture scale effects if everyone is trying to retire early and live off real-estate income and here it is: we as a species regress in the single most indicator of progress: energy autonomy cause we can't afford it because our cultural narrative doesn't motivate enough people to specialize in it depriving us from clean energy production and literally destroying the earth we inhibit.
Because U.S. environmentalists were, and are, happy with the NRC making it virtually impossible to build them with a sea of totally unnecessary red tape.
> We can roughly break the costs of operating any power plant into three categories: fuel costs, operation and maintenance costs, and capital costs
The article forgets to mention another cost: The cost of disposing/storing used up fuel. This is often forgotten, but a major cost too, if the spent fuel is to be stored safely and securely. And it needs to be stored like that for hundreds of thousands of years!
Switzerland is currently in the process of building a national waste storing facility, a quick Google search showed that the US currently does not have one.
It's only a major cost due to the need to manage media headlines, NIMBYism and an uninformed public. You actually could just dump it into the ocean to join the billion tons of Uranium already there...
People also seem to forget that the power plants have to be removed after their lifecycle. The safe decommission of a nuclear power plant takes decades and costs billions again.
For one thing since recent history shows the actual cost was going to be about $25 Billion for the kind of plant people expect to go forward with, construction never would have been approved unless the estimate could have been artificially reduced to some more palatable number to begin with.
Plus the bigger the ticket item, the more profit for suppliers and better commission for salespeople all up and down the line of such a huge project.
The fundamental purpose is to be a gravy train not to bring affordable power to the masses unless some kind of bonanza has fully taken place beforehand.
Contractors and everyone involved know this and are prepared to take whatever bonanza they can get as long as it lasts, and it can be more lucrative than other sizable projects without even going to completion. It's the sale of a lifetime and more people than ever expect to be set for life with bonuses before construction even starts.
Plus the true need for increased safety is an issue and all industries have spiraling costs here since insurance companies are involved, even if more so during construction than operation. Not only is more safety layered on than was once acceptable, but shareholders of insurance companies wanted to experience unbroken growth in returns to beat inflation since the 1970's and 1980's too. They are traded on the same stock market as value-added companies.
One thing I never understand about the "higher safety standards increase costs" argument is that those higher safety standards are also used as a strong argument on how safe nuclear is. But then it's criticized at the same time for driving the costs up. So either we have extremely safe plants that can be built and operated safely in the thousands worldwide, or we have cheap plants that can be built quickly, but at the expense of safety. Thus far we could not have both.
[+] [-] arcticbull|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/jigar-shah-on-the-does...
[+] [-] barake|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t... [2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
[+] [-] concordDance|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw_a_grenade|2 years ago|reply
This quote sums it up nicely:
> It doesn’t matter how standardized your design is if you end up needing to change it on every project to meet new requirements.
[+] [-] gweinberg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
It's just that no such merchant nuclear plant has ever been built anywhere. There's a serious lack of dog food here.
[+] [-] atoav|2 years ago|reply
I think every HN user who programs knows that the process of copy-pasting comes with it's own danger. You are not automatically getting a working thing if the context you are pasting into differs ever so slightly.
If one plans to build a lot of nuclear plants that context might be something you can control. One of the things I would worry about is water and how to cool it.
Last summer most of France's nuclear power plants were switched off because the rivers they use for cooling were dried out. And the presidictions on the climate catastrophe have gotten worse.
[+] [-] hotpotamus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|2 years ago|reply
Like one that can have its liquid fuel removed by just piping?
That's very development was done using a closet-sized reactor that could be easily powered up and powered down so it CAN scale with demand?
Whose design is inherently meltdown-proof?
Which uses almost all its fuel so there's no nuclear waste to transport?
That can breed its fuel from Thorium?
The time to invest in this was 20 years ago. Certainly the viability of nuclear missed the boat 10 years ago.
Nuclear will have to wait for solar/wind/battery and other grid levelling alternatives (home solar + storage, EVs-as-grid-batteries) to mature and develop before they have a stable economic target.
Then nuclear needs to figure out how to make that target. I think it is a LFTR, but who knows. I don't think solid fuel rods are the way. Too much waste, too much danger inherent to the fuel packaging.
And seriously, "the institute for progress"? The nuclear industry is so out of touch their marketing and lobbying is 30 years out of date.
[+] [-] Simulacra|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atyppo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fundad|2 years ago|reply
Selling a basic design or a micro reactor means the industry would have to compete for the first time.
[+] [-] Schroedingersat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cj|2 years ago|reply
She would bring one of the fans home and say “Look! I just sold 10 of these for $1,000,000”
The fans themselves were cheap to manufacture. But they were SO incredibly important that they could NOT fail under any circumstance. (They were mostly fans meant to cool electronic systems, and if they failed, would cause the plane or space craft to explode, literally)
The fans were so expensive because they had to go through so many quality checks to ensure they would sustain every environment imaginable, compounded with the fact that there’s no scale in demand (no one other than Boeing, NASA, etc is going to buy a tiny $100k fan)
Tiny production volume + huge quality requirements/standards = very expensive product.
I assume a similar dynamic applies to many components in a nuclear power plant. Volume is very low and the quality/reliability requirements are very high.
[+] [-] Lramseyer|2 years ago|reply
My theory might be speculative and totally off the mark. But when you compare deaths per TWh of energy produced, coal is responsible for almost 3 orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear. So maybe the real question is "how has coal power stayed so cheap?" or "if we tried to make coal power as safe as nuclear, what would it cost?"
[+] [-] abhibeckert|2 years ago|reply
The search to find the capsule cost four million dollars and there were global news stories warning people to avoid the highway the (very, very long) highway the truck had driven down.
In other countries (e.g. Soviet ones) where precautions like that haven't been taken, those capsules have been found after dozens of people caught cancer due to regular exposure to a capsule that just happened to end up near them. Presumably there are more that haven't been found, and those countries just accept a higher rate of cancer than the rest of the world.
Avoiding those scenarios is what costs so much.
[+] [-] jimworm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] concordDance|2 years ago|reply
Those millions of dollars could have saved a dozen lives, while odds are very high that capsule would have not been found by a civilian until after decaying to a harmless level. In the very unlikely event of being found it would likely have killed only one or two people.
[+] [-] renewiltord|2 years ago|reply
You would expect that if risk of radiation source loss underlies cost then they would be much more expensive.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] canadianfella|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] r2vcap|2 years ago|reply
Also, I wonder if the US has accumulated know-how to lower the cost of nuclear power plant construction. Korea has continued to build nuclear power plants, and it is clear that it has the know-how to cut costs.
[+] [-] pcurve|2 years ago|reply
https://ieefa.org/articles/european-pressurized-reactors-nuc....
The cost overrun is a global problem.
The five European Pressurized Reactors (EPRs) designed by French utility EDF have all suffered unanticipated issues that have led to costly delays and soaring price
Findings of a 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis that found successive iterations of a new nuclear design generally cost more than the original project
Although a pair of Chinese EPRs have been completed and are generating power, one unit was shut down for more than a year because of faulty fuel rods.
Costs and delays have also plagued EPRs in France, the United Kingdom, and Finland, where the completion of the Olkiluoto 3 reactor has been delayed 17 years
[+] [-] aubanel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyrale|2 years ago|reply
> [...] the energy transition,” said Frank Bass, an IEEFA editor and author of the study. “Unfortunately, [...]
The site also seems to be a content farm, with the article rehashing the MIT study already posted here.
[+] [-] jtriangle|2 years ago|reply
This whole system of retroactively requiring changes made is absurdly costly and it's why we're stuck in terms of building out new capacity. This is not de-regulation, just changing how we regulate this from something that is actively antagonistic to something that is not.
[+] [-] bradley13|2 years ago|reply
I am reminded of my summer internship installing a computer system in a sewage plant. One of my jobs was testing the connection of the computer system to sensors. I needed a guide to show me where the sensors were located, and then I needed to attach a multimeter to the wires while someone on the computer end sent a signal. So two people needed.
However, there were six of us: The guide. The guy who could open the sensor cover. The guy who could attach the clips to the wires. The guy who read the meter. The guy who made sure each person only did his part of the job. And me. 300% of the required labor, so 300% of the costs.
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done-ebook/dp/B0B3...
It might well be that nuclear plants are even worse than other types of projects, but I'd like to see the proof.
[+] [-] chasil|2 years ago|reply
- Monocrystaline turbine blades have become required due to their ability to operate at higher temperatures than the melting points of the metals that compose their alloys. The requirement is their efficiency in power production. These are also used in aerospace, but are complex and difficult to produce.
- Common water reactors must contain insanely high pressures, enough to force water to remain liquid at 300°C or higher. This is not inexpensive.
- Molten salt reactors, where deployed, must be composed of alloys resistant to molten (negative) chloride ions and (positive) sodium ions, assuming the fluid chemically disassociates. Alloys that can withstand these conditions are also not inexpensive.
[+] [-] metal_am|2 years ago|reply
-Current nuclear reactors aren’t nearly hot enough to need single crystal turbine blisks. We’re talking on the order of 300°C.
-Coal power plant routinely hit much higher temperatures in supercritical and ultra-supercritical (yes, that’s a real term) steam generators. We don’t have quite as bad a problem building coal power plants.
-We’re not currently building molten salt reactors for power generation.
You didn’t say anything that was wrong. I’m just don’t think this is the reason building reactors is so expensive.
[+] [-] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rgmerk|2 years ago|reply
1) in 2050, the world will get its energy almost exclusively from renewable sources, with a combination of batteries, hydrogen, biogas, hydropower (conventional and pumped), and demand management used to cope with variability.
2) Energy, even taking into account transmission and firming costs, will be cheaper than it ever was.
3) Message boards will still be full of arguments over nuclear energy.
[+] [-] apatheticonion|2 years ago|reply
Solar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm
The Topaz Solar Farm in the US has a capacity of 550MW and a construction cost of $2.5b US billion.
That puts it at a cost of $4.5 million per MW capacity (550MW / 2.5b) (adjusted for inflation that's $3.2b USD or $5.8m per MW). It is used at 26% of its capacity which I assume is due to the non dispatchable nature of solar (would likely change if batteries were added - increasing cost).
Assuming a 10 year loan at 3% adds $500m bringing it to $6.7m per MW capacity
Nuclear:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
The Palo Verde nuclear plant has a capacity of 3937MW and a construction cost of $12.6b USD adjusted for inflation. That puts it at a cost of $3.2m per MW capacity and it was used at 82% of its capacity over its lifetime.
Interest at 3% over 10 years adds 2b to the figure making it $3.7m per MW capacity
Limitations:
This doesn't consider running costs, maintenance or factor how usage capacity affects cost.
Maybe I am missing something, perhaps the running costs of nuclear eclipse the total cost of solar + batteries over 50 years? Maybe the loans granted for nuclear are at a much higher interest rate than those granted for other power projects? Is insurance a factor?
[+] [-] vinay_ys|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adhambadr|2 years ago|reply
one of the first very tangible direct "Macro" effects of the rise of non-contributing b.s jobs (Consulting, Life Coaches, Influencers, Day Trading and everything else under the 4 hour week mantra).
I've always wondered what are the big picture scale effects if everyone is trying to retire early and live off real-estate income and here it is: we as a species regress in the single most indicator of progress: energy autonomy cause we can't afford it because our cultural narrative doesn't motivate enough people to specialize in it depriving us from clean energy production and literally destroying the earth we inhibit.
[+] [-] RagnarD|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slicktux|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fhennig|2 years ago|reply
The article forgets to mention another cost: The cost of disposing/storing used up fuel. This is often forgotten, but a major cost too, if the spent fuel is to be stored safely and securely. And it needs to be stored like that for hundreds of thousands of years!
Switzerland is currently in the process of building a national waste storing facility, a quick Google search showed that the US currently does not have one.
[+] [-] concordDance|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hovering_nox|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuzzfactor|2 years ago|reply
Plus the bigger the ticket item, the more profit for suppliers and better commission for salespeople all up and down the line of such a huge project.
The fundamental purpose is to be a gravy train not to bring affordable power to the masses unless some kind of bonanza has fully taken place beforehand.
Contractors and everyone involved know this and are prepared to take whatever bonanza they can get as long as it lasts, and it can be more lucrative than other sizable projects without even going to completion. It's the sale of a lifetime and more people than ever expect to be set for life with bonuses before construction even starts.
Plus the true need for increased safety is an issue and all industries have spiraling costs here since insurance companies are involved, even if more so during construction than operation. Not only is more safety layered on than was once acceptable, but shareholders of insurance companies wanted to experience unbroken growth in returns to beat inflation since the 1970's and 1980's too. They are traded on the same stock market as value-added companies.
[+] [-] locallost|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|2 years ago|reply
More on the subject:
https://climateer.substack.com/p/learning-curves
https://www.volts.wtf/p/learning-curves-will-lead-to-extreme...
https://www.volts.wtf/p/which-technologies-get-cheaper-over#...