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by mandevil
1204 days ago
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Basically, you can look at [the list of nuclear plants under construction](https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...) and see that the Russians VVER series are still going up around the word (over 20), the Chinese are building a bunch (of many different international and domestic designs, I don't think they've built one for another country yet), the South Koreans have 4 under construction around the world, there are 4 AP1000 (two in China, two in Georgia) and 6 EPR (2 in China, 1 in France, 1 in Finland, 2 in UK). (Plus a couple of oddities like Argentina and India building a new domestic design each.) I think an under-appreciated point is that if you do a pause on nuclear construction, say because of the Fukushima Dai Ichi or Three Mile Island or whatever, you lose the skills to deliver them on time and quickly very fast, and it actually seems to be harder to rebuild than it was to build the first time. My suspicion is that the first time your standards are lower, and so you don't design as aggressively and your workmen deliver okay workmanship. Then you pause for a while, all your experience scatters to the wind, but you need to deliver next generation performance, and you just don't have the industrial base to actually build it on time and under budget. This doesn't seem to be a just-America problem: France alone built ~60 reactors in the 1970's and 1980's and Germany and the UK built more, but the EPR has been just as big as disaster as the AP1000, because they didn't build new reactors in the 1990's and that experience withered away, but are still trying to deliver that next generation performance. |
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Supplied energy seems to have leveled out also: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
Time to say goodbye and maybe think hard why those Russian and Chinese reactors come up so fast and cheap, and prepare for the fallout...