[locallost]

The article starts by praising the French nuclear program in the 70s. Yet, that same nuclear program is currently going through a complete debacle, failing to provide for its own country's needs, and is partially the reason prices are going into the stratosphere on the whole continent. If you can't factor in the reality of what is actually happening as we speak as a potential risk for your analysis, well...

The French futures market is almost at 2000 Euros per MWh for the next two quarters [1]. You'd think the market is not anticipating those nuclear plants are coming back online any time soon.

Can we not talk about this as a success story please?

[1] https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...

[Manuel_D]

Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators [1] is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get better deals on input materials by guaranteeing a stable demand.

France's nuclear program in the 70s was much more effective than current nuclear projects because of that economy of scale. They build ~50 reactors of only a few types. The US is similar: many of its plants built in the late 1960 and 1970s delivered power at $2-3 billon USD per GW (adjusted for inflation), and some of them under $2 billion per GW. And these aren't equal to other forms of generation: nuclear power's capacity factor is among the highest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...

[fundatus]

> Nuclear power is cheaper when built in serial production. That's the basic conclusion of any analysis of the history of nuclear power construction. There's nuance as to why, but the basic pattern is that putting an order of 40 steam generators is cheaper than a run of just 4 of them. Similar deal with specialized pumps and other nuclear power components. Suppliers can re-use infrastructure and expertise, and get better deals on input materials by guaranteeing a stable demand.

Unintuitively though, this is incorrect - both for France[1] and the US[2]. Building subsequent versions of the same reactor design increases the cost - instead of it staying the same or going down.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

[2] https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118

[Manuel_D]

Not coincidentally, that study only decided on 1976 for its analysis. If I order 6 plants of the same design, then drop the next batch down to 4 plants for the next run, then 2 plants for the third run, then I should expect the cost to go up as scale goes down.

Here's a publication that points this out. In fact, it calls out the article you linked specifically: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

See that cluster in the late 60s and early 70s: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...

That's the benefits of scale. The slower pace of construction after that is accompanied by higher costs.

[7952]

I have worked on large infrastructure projects and this doesn't surprise me at all.

* Repeat projects bring a new set of biases. People see it as an opportunity to "get it right this time".

* People are excited about the new project (more bias).

* The presence of expertise and experience will make contractors want to charge more rather than less.

* New contractors may bid for the project at a low price but lack that hard won experience.

* Efficient manufacturing is a difficult and expensive field in its own right. It will be more complex than building the initial run. And the scale of production may never justify that.

* Many contractors will bring expertise and experience from other fields. But you will also compete for their time with other projects. The guys doing the massive civils contract are sought after by the tunnelling project or the roads project.

* Civil engineering is very dependant on the site and can be very expensive even if it is technically trivial.

* You work in an economy with a high cost of living. Salaries grow.

[erentz]

Saw this interesting chart recently on the French case. Shows generally decreasing costs between first to last of a generation but then stepwise cost increases when moving to the next generation.

https://twitter.com/autommen/status/1559097869940006916?s=21...

[qqqwerty]

From the article:

So many orders came in that “[w]ith only two companies building plants, a rapid increase in orders escalated costs for major components and strained the limited supply of qualified labor.”

[Manuel_D]

Plants built in the 1960s and 1970s did exceptionally well on a cost to energy ratio. They were also built in greater numbers than in the 1980s and onwards: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S03014215163001...

The source given for that sentence is: Steve Isser, Electricity Restructuring in the United States: Markets and Policy from the 1978 Energy Act to the Present. So whatever that sentence is talking about, it happened after the period of rapid construction and cheap costs.

[Georgelemental]

France's nuclear plants are failing to provide for the country's needs because incompetent politicians shut down perfectly functional plants like Fessenheim, and in general refused to invest to maintain the system and preserve expertise. French nuclear didn't fail on its own merits, it was sabotaged.

[hef19898]

Not sure how politicians are directly responsible for a Europe wide drought making it close to impissible to get enough cooling water to nuclear plants to producr anywhere near nominal capacity.

[Manuel_D]

It's not a question of enough cooling water. It's a problem of how much the plant is allowed to heat the river. Because apparently keeping a stretch of river below 28*C is more important than climate change.

[bobthepanda]

Not killing all the fish in a river is also generally something that should be aimed for, since that can have knock on effects on ecosystems. We’d rather not find out what happens and accidentally instigate some kind of environmental disaster that might lead to farm failures or something unexpected.

[Manuel_D]

The limit on the temperature is as low as 26C or 79F. It's not like the river is boiling. Furthermore this heat dissipates downstream, it's not affecting the entire waterway. This heat has the potential to harm fish in a segment of a few rivers. By comparison, throttling carbon-free energy production has the certain impact of producing more greenhouse gases, which will contribute to global climate change. I seriously don't see how someone makes this kind of tradeoff - it's like the same mentality that held up a solar farm to relocate tortoises.

[bobthepanda]

* many rivers have some kind of migratory fish integral to ecosystems in both the river and whatever the outlet is, so you can’t just mark rivers as discrete segments and say the effect is isolated

* the oceans haven’t warmed by all that much and we are already seeing the impacts, it’s not really that much of a stretch to say rivers would see similar effects

* given humanity’s track record with the question “how bad could this be?” and unintended consequences, erring on the side of caution seems warranted. In particular, humanity has a bad track record with river management

[TheLoafOfBread]

They are by building power plants without cooling towers. Problem is not enough water, but because water discharged back to river is too hot.

[hef19898]

I always liked simple answers to comokex questions like, e.g, nuclear power plant cooling. Especially when they come with pre defined scape goats.

[Manuel_D]

It's not a complex question, and river temperature is not a scapegoat. It's the the explicit reason why the plants aren't operating at full capacity: https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-power-production-curtailed-....

[locallost]

That's a stretch considering how many of them are out currently. Things either work or they don't. There are always growing pains, but nuclear has had way over 50 years and it hasn't worked.

I listened to parts of the recent John Carmack interview, and he touched on nuclear and it was the first time I heard somebody pro nuclear say something sensible on the topic. He said, based on everything he knows, it shouldn't be as expensive as it is and there just needs to be someone like Musk with SpaceX to make a business case. I neither agree not disagree because I don't know, but at least the faith in it is based on something, it acknowledges it doesn't work right now, but here is what needs to happen. All the rest are pretty much like this article, nuclear is the only option because it is, and that's it, move along. That doesn't cut it.

[Georgelemental]

Nuclear works and has worked just fine where and when there has been a sane government/regulatory environment.

[makeitdouble]

Political incompetency should really be baked in any discussion about pushing more nuclear.

You can have miracle new reactor designs, but do you have a society that matches it and will properly manage the technology for the next 50 years ?

[choko]

You could have stopped after the word "discussion".

[makeitdouble]

I’m pretty optimistic a bout a lot of other things. I think political issues can be overcome, and we can achieve pretty incredible things on case by case basis, as long as it’s not expected to be a permanent state.

Flying rockets requires a lot, and we can manage it. But also the earth won’t be a burning hell if tomorrow some new guy comes in and decides to scrap all human flight plans.