[just_human]

> The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction.

Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.

[PaulHoule]

I want to see a real explanation of the bungling that makes projects go 3x late and over budget and it is not "environmentalists" who might make it go 20% late.

I've looked long and hard and not found an explanation of the bungling fitting the facts better than that it's like a poker game: the vendor never believed in the sticker price, but the vendors figured that once there were chips in the pot the sunk cost fallacy would mean the buyers would never fold.

Thing is, they do, at least in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal

I think NuScale was trying to be honest about costs but the buyer in Utah built a process in which they could control costs by folding early and they did. Europe, China, and other places have more engineering thinking and less financialization and they're more likely to "stay the course" but as an engineer I'm not sure this is right -- it might work for China but not for Europe.

On one hand I'm glad to see GE get the BWR, especially the work done on ESBWR, back into the game with the BWRX300, but the costs they are quoting are too freaky low and their talk about "design to cost" makes it seem like they just quote the cost number that they need to be competitive with the solar sticker price without storage which will lure in the public as opposed to being competitive to whatever the (unknown) solar + storage sticker price will turn out to be. (e.g. highly variable because it depends by "how frequent blackouts will your accept?")

[just_human]

Lots of interesting history here, but most relevant was that regulatory and process changes starting in the 80's made it increasingly expensive to build reactors. As a result, reactor construction companies (notably Westinghouse) went bankrupt and no entity was willing to take financial risk to build new reactors. Western Europe is a different story, where political parties aggressively shutdown healthy nuclear plants and passed laws preventing new nuclear.

Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US (by both political parties) and Europe is slowly coming around to allowing new nuclear. NuScale is one of many next gen companies (I hope they're all successful), but the traditional large reactors are also great and can be built cost effectively.

[XorNot]

It's just experience in most cases. We don't build enough so the management and project structures and experience to do it never get a chance to be efficient.

The right thing to do with something like the Vogtle plant for example would be to keep building them since you've just paid some very expensive costs learning what causes delays, but the knowledge of what gets the plant built - because it was built - is still there and fresh.

[johncolanduoni]

This is the idea behind the “small modular” part of SMR. Current nuclear projects are huge, largely bespoke efforts that require a bunch of contract firms working together on different parts of the project. The idea of SMR is to push most of the necessary parts one after another from a factory. The best analogy I’ve heard for this is comparing how the Japanese built planes in WWII (in small batches done by craftsmen) to how the US did (with an assembly line following a documented process). I buy the conceptual argument, but there are a lot of details to work out.