| > Flamanville reactor in France was supposed to cost 3.3 G€ in 2007, it is now at 19.1 G€ in 2020 and called a "mess" by energy minister (https://www.montelnews.com/en/story/french-epr-is-a-mess--en...). Your information is very misleading, very. The quote come from the minister of the ecological transition, not 'energy minister', whose official duty is, quoting wikipedia 'responsible for preparing and implementing the French government’s policy in the fields of sustainable development, climate, energy transition, and biodiversity.' This new minister has a political degree (Science Po), no technological background, and is member of the local pro-ecological party since 2000. Of course she's referring to EPR as a mess, which is true in a certain way, but in her mind it's just a political stance she's feeling obligated to say publicly. Of course the EPR is a giant project, maybe too giant, of course it was underestimated in order to get it going, and of course it takes much longer to be built than every one would want. But that's the price of technological advancement, that's how we learn to build better things. And what's the alternative? 1650MWe of wind turbines, where would you put it? |
It had a projected cost of $5.2 billion for a nameplate capacity of 1.2GW and an actual average output of 0.46GW. Scaled to the output of the Flamanville mess (1.6GW), it means that a wind farm with equivalent average output would cost about $18 billion. Though I imagine that the average lifetime of a 174-turbines wind farm over an area of 630 sq kms in the middle of the sea might be shorter than that of a nuclear plant.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsea_Wind_Farm