[Manuel_D]

The French have the same problems of loss of engineering capability. They built many reactors of the same design during the Messmer plan, but haven't had to build new reactors in a long time. The fact that nuclear plants are so long-lived is a huge strength: they are among the cheapest forms of green energy if they are allowed to serve the entirety of their service life. But because they last so long, if you build a bunch of them there's no reason to build more for half a century.

[Krasnol]

Weird that the French somehow missed all those basic facts some random person can come up on the internet when they presented their designs in recent years and started building those massively over budget and overdue projects, eh?

> they are among the cheapest forms of green energy

The only interpretation of "cheap" which makes nuclear "cheapest" in something is the one where you ignore everything related to nuclear waste. From reprocessing over storage to decommissioning. Making it a lie, basically. Just like the "green" in this greenwashing.

[Manuel_D]

What facts are the French missing? The point is that building 48 reactors of the same design (like in the Messmer plan) is cheaper on a per-unit basis than building 2 reactors of a new design. The learnings from the first few builds inform subsequent iterations, and these learnings decay over time as plants haven't been built in decades. I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

Nuclear waste disposal is not a huge portion of nuclear power's cost, it accounts for about 10% [1]. Nuclear plant builders have to finance the cost of disposal upfront. Decommissioning is even less - less than one percent if the plant serves its full service life.

1. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec....

[Gwypaas]

They had reduced costs within each generation but the costs between generations increased wildly.

They never saw any kinds of economics of scale.

Have a look at Figure 25 here and add Flamanville 3 waaaay beyond the end of the scale at $12 000/kWe

https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-07...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Pl...

[Manuel_D]

You just described an economy of scale: costs within generations went down. The more plants in the same generation the lower the cost.

Flamanville is the first EPR France has built, and this it's not leveraging the intra-generational learnings.

[Gwypaas]

Take the 20% cost reduction the last two generations lead to. That would change Flamanville 3 from exorbitantly expensive to exorbitantly expensive.

The French nuclear program as a whole has had a huge negative learning curve. The more they've built and learned the more expensive they have become. Sure you can brush of 20% with a lot of money down the drain, but that does not make it in any way economical.

[Manuel_D]

At the end of the day, the cost of reactors built when there was large scale serial production was considerably cheaper than they are now: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

The "negative learning curve" both in France and in the USA happened as the pace of reactor construction slowed. The "negative learning curve" you're referring to is actually the loss of the economies of scale.