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France has been trying to start their fleet rebuild at Flamanville, but it's proving to take far far too long. 15 years of construction and it's unclear when it will be generating electricity. Olkiluoto, using the same design, was trumpeted to be ready at the beginning of the year, but is still not online. Intuition tells me that after 4 decades of construction productivity being stagnant, we will not have any sudden improvements in construction productivity any time soon. Also, my intuition on wind and solar is entirely different from yours. It's already so much cheaper, faster, and easier to deploy wind onshore, wind offshore, and solar that I can't imagine nuclear being able to catch up. And storage is live today, and ready for the grid. We are scaling storage production capacity far more quickly than we could hope to scale nuclear construction capacity. The difficulty of commencing nuclear construction at, say, 500GW per year, is absolutely staggering. But we will be very close to that for wind and solar, correcting for capacity factor, quite soon. |