[screye]

Genuine question. What is the stopping the US from paying every experienced French Nuclear Engineer x 2 x Usual US cost Adjustment --> and letting them build here in the US ? France and US are allies, and likely aligned on climate goals. France has similar climate as many of the planned regions and has fairly high building standards.

[dotnet00]

The US has no lack of relevant engineers, after all, it does maintain a large fleet of nuclear powered vessels. As is usual with most of America's problems, there's just a lack of sufficiently concentrated political will to get things done.

[JohnBooty]

That, and the influence of the fossil fuel companies.

[HPsquared]

That's probably the biggest single contributor to the lack of political will. Not just the company bosses, though - a lot of the employees will have similar interests. Say there's an "oil town" or a "coal town", that's a lot of voters.

[lobotomified]

I'd resist policies that threaten my job too.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Makes sense, considering the survival of humanity generally comes (if ever) after immediate personal survival is secured

[HPsquared]

Indeed. Worth keeping in mind though that the fossil fuel people successfully displaced whalers and candlestick makers.

[ibejoeb]

Certainly. It's an odd dynamic because the same people who want to eliminate fossils also hate nuclear. The trending political position is energy austerity, while at the same time electrifying everything. But that's just not going to happen. (Well, I guess it does in California with the rolling blackouts.)

[dabraham1248]

Yes, after all, the reason that Texas is currently working on laws to block renewable power generation in favor of fossil fuel power is because their power grid is _too_ reliable.

[ibejoeb]

Not sure what point you're trying to make. I think it'd be a great idea to build nuclear in Texas.

[prottog]

> there's just a lack of sufficiently concentrated political will to get things done.

Ideally it shouldn't be the case that something like building a power plant to produce electricity shouldn't require political will; just willing investors and operators who desire to make a profit.

[layer8]

The lack of willing investors might indicate that they are doubtful about the profitability.

[prottog]

Absolutely true, but the profitability is likely affected precisely by government policy.

[layer8]

Well, surely the government can’t allow anyone to just build a nuclear power plant, so some policies are required. I can’t judge how reasonable or unreasonable the current ones are. But I can imagine for reasonable policies to be unprofitable without government subsidies, and that would require political will.

[brohee]

By policy, over the next 80 years.

[anovikov]

If a political will is needed to do X, we need to look again at whether we really need it. Normally stuff that's needed, happens by itself as market forces push it.

[dotnet00]

Which is why healthcare, housing and education is super affordable, big tech companies are respecting people's privacy and freedom and climate change has been averted.

[nine_k]

Exactly! They all lack some of the properties that make markets efficient, or form a market at all.

- Healthcare cannot be an efficient free market, where those who can pay most receive the best, and those who cannot pay get nothing. The reasons are pretty obvious. It sort-of-works as an insurance scheme, but currently in the US it's more like a payment scheme (and prices blow up), and in most of the EU is like a redistribution scheme (and amount of care is highly minimized until your condition is really serious).

- Housing in desired areas is heavily influenced administratively by zoning and other stifling norms (hello, SF), and also lack of land in desirable areas (hello, Manhattan). If you agree to live far from bustling megacities or posh suburbs, houses are relatively affordable. (But how are you going to earn the money then?)

- Privacy is not something you want to sell on the market; the whole point is to prevent it. So market forces can't solve it directly. You can buy e.g. an iPhone that gives you more privacy, or use a paid search engine and, a paid email provider, a VPN, etc if you agree to pay more for preserving your privacy; here the markets work well.

- Climate change is again not about trading and competition, because its downsides were not priced into any goods, and mostly are not yet still. Make carbon emission expensive, and the market forces will do their job. E.g. a lot of datacenters are carbon-neutral and powered by solar / wind / hydro just because otherwise the electricity ends up being pretty expensive.

[sideshowb]

Making carbon emission expensive you say? Lobbyists have historically stopped that one, so we're back to an issue of political will.

What's your market solution for that one? Making lobbying even more expensive? I guess that's the fixed point of this function

[markus92]

> Making carbon emission expensive you say? Lobbyists have historically stopped that one, so we're back to an issue of political will.

EU is doing it, with CBAM. Basically internally trading emissions and taxing carbon at the border.

[robertlagrant]

> Lobbyists have historically stopped that one

Lobbyists don't stop this. Government chooses to listen to lobbyists. I don't understand why people don't blame the government for government failings.

Giving them free money from taxes and expecting them to not be bribed is not too much to ask.

[HPsquared]

I suppose if lobbyists run things we need someone to lobby the lobbyists.

[roenxi]

Most of those things are being caused by political will.

Healthcare is paralysed by over-regulation. There are lots of easy ways to bring down costs in healthcare that the average entreprenure would love to fix. They don't fix the problems because most of those ways have been made illegal because regulators who adopt a do-no-harm approach that ironically causes more harm than good. In every country I can read the laws of, a doctor and a patient trying to make decisions about healthcare are going to discover that the regulator is in the room 2nd guessing them.

Housing and education, assuming we are talking the US, have been flooded with credit by the government. That happens to be why costs are so high. There is no way the levels of money there are the market-optimal amounts. Every so often the housing market tries to shed debt and force people to buy the things they enjoy and the regulators step in with money printing. I'm pretty sure the US even has such a thing as a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage which is insane. I see figures as high as trillions [0] in the things.

Big tech the reason we need privacy is because sooner or later there will be authoritarians in charge with a lot of political will, using that data. There is a conversation to be had there; the Europeans have crippled their tech sector and privacy legislation was a part of that. Maybe the upside is worth the costs.

Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.

[0] https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-statistics/

[pfdietz]

The biggest problem with healthcare is that doctors are sued if they don't provide state of the art care. So there's an incentive to produce more and more expensive drugs and technologies, and no (or at least insufficient) ability to trade off cost vs. effectiveness.

[Panzer04]

Flooding the housing market with credit is only an issue because there isn't enough housing so prices are demand driven rather than supply driven.

[anovikov]

But that is caused by nothing but zoning! That's the only reason. Sure, in a token few places like NYC, probably prices would be sky high even without the zoning, but in the absolute majority of places, not at all. Zoning is a politically pushed limitation of construction for the benefit of incumbents - local property owners who want their housing values to go sky high, and they achieve it. It's example of conseqences of government action.

[roenxi]

I did consider that a little after posting - my conclusion was that people who don't have access to credit will be pushed out of the market and forced to rent.

[briandear]

> Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.

Some of us feel that you can literally wipe the US off the map and it wouldn’t make a single degree’s worth of difference to climate. Some of us also feel that the climate movement is not about climate but about resource redistribution and thus suspect in its real intent.

[ako]

Nah, market forces are usually short term, whereas political forces should handle long term needs.

[pyrale]

> Normally stuff that's needed, happens by itself as market forces push it.

...As we can see in our efforts to avoid climate change.

[nine_k]

While market forces may be pushing for it, administrative forces may be pushing in an opposite direction.

[hanniabu]

In my experience, admin will go out of there way and to multitudes more work in order to not get anything done

[nine_k]

To do work is what they are paid for.

To solve the problem which an organization was created to solve means to show that the organization is no longer needed. But this means no more work to be paid for!

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Administer is the opposite of complete.

[hanniabu]

We really need a lot of things yet nothing is being done about it

[pyrale]

This may come as a surprise to you, but many french people have no interest living in the US, even for more money.

> France and US are allies

Probably not after such an event.

[calaphos]

The same reason that France is utterly failing at building flamaville 3 - it's not a technical problem but of regulation, government and public support.

[Xixi]

And yet, EDF successfully built Taishan 1 and Taishan 2 in China, pretty much in time and in budget. There were a couple of teething issues (as expected given these were the first two EPRs to enter service), but they are now running great.

According to Yves Bréchet [1], former head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, the main difference is not regulation, government or public support. It's something that should speak a lot to the engineers on HN, but is almost always absent in public debates: the lack of technical expertise. Think expert welders, pipe-fitters, boiler makers, etc. The expertise required when making a nuclear power plant is very high, including and especially when it comes to welding, quality of steel, etc.

Costly mistakes were made while welding critical parts of Flamanville 3 for instance, requiring expansive and expensive rework. I don't think Hinkley Point C is faring much better. On the other side of the world China has been building nuclear power plants relentlessly: they have all the expertise needed. If you allow me a slight exaggeration, given France and UK massive de-industrialization over the last few decades, we are now amateurs compared to China.

Again, it's not an issue of regulation. It's just that when you don't build things the know-how gets lost very very quickly. Something that should get hammered in the head of all CEOs/managers/decision maker...

[1] https://www.thinkerview.com/france-la-strategie-du-canard-sa...

[guerby]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

"It was estimated that the plant’s investment cost would rise to between 22 and 23 yuan per watt from an originally budgeted 14 yuan"

So about 60% cost overrun.

[Xixi]

Compared to Hinkley Point, Flamanville or Olkiluoto, that’s actually pretty good…

[pfdietz]

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, the play was pretty good, wasn't it?

[seqastian]

So public support wasn't an issue in China?!

[Xixi]

Yves Bréchet point in the linked video is that it’s first and foremost technical expertise, rather than political/regulatory landscape that explains why Taishan has fared better than the other EPR projects.

It’s not something we (I’m European) want to hear.

It doesn’t mean that public support doesn’t impact projects in Europe (or democracies in general), but it should not be used as an excuse to refuse to look further.

For instance Flamanville got a massive delay because of welding issues. That’s not a regulatory or public opinion issue. That’s an issue with the (lack of) expertise of French welders.

I don’t remember if it is for this one, or for repairs in other French nuclear power plants, but Canadian welders were called to the rescue…

[pfdietz]

I think it was for other nuclear plants that had been operating. Foreign welders were needed because there was only so much welding one worker could do before they reached their radiation exposure limit.

[rowanG077]

I'm not sure whether this is a troll post or but China is not a democracy. So public support isn't needed.

[OJFord]

US compliance & regulation, which would take three committees and five years to approve each metric BOM item or certified acceptable substitute?.

You don't even need to oay the engineers more, not only because you have engineers, but because EDF for example can be given attractive enough terms to build and operate overseas, as it has in the UK.

[thrawa8387336]

Probably the biggest bureaucracy in the world. Wonder how it compares per capita with China

[OJFord]

Hard to be sure because of the population difference, but India's got to be well up there. US border control is a paramilitary operation; India's is a bureaucratic one.

[AtlasBarfed]

Look, the elephant in the room is that if a power company wants to invest a billion dollars in power generation, they are going to do it with solar/wind. The project scales out, the cost is dropping constantly, and they get power generation early in the project.

A nuclear power plant is:

- a 10 year investment delay (with no return until completed)

- could be cancelled at any moment (high risk)

- with a very uncertain price target (solar/wind + grid storage will probably be half the cost or less of what it is today)

- can't be expanded

- very likely to balloon in cost and be a total financial quagmire

Solar/wind can be scalably purchased, installed, and expanded as needed. The costs will drop continuously, replacement and maintenance is easy, there's no nuclear waste to get rid of, and can very reliably be specced in terms of cost for generation.

[belorn]

Power companies that wants to invest a billion dollars in power generation will also invest into fossil fueled power delivery. Solar and wind produce a lot of cheap energy when the weather is optimal, but when the weather change and demand exceeds supply, the market price of energy goes to the roof. Last winter in Europe we saw prices spikes well over 100x of what the average market cost, which primarily went pay for fossil fueled power generation. Fossil fueled power delivery also get a lot of subsidizes in order to provide reserve energy, so they get the advantage of being paid twice.

Solar and wind is excellent investment for those wanting to compete when supply in the grid is high and prices are low. Nuclear, hydro, storage and fossil fuels are there to compete with supply is low and prices high.

[Zigurd]

But not the ones who underestimated decommissioning costs by a factor of 4 vs. Germany's estimates, and about a factor of 10 vs. UK. France is not the paragon of nuclear efficiency it is commonly portrayed as being.

It's not just that NPPs are expensive to build, and unpredictably priced in ways that make the price of power generated uncompetitive. They are also a large and hard to predict liability after they stop generating power and the income from selling that power.

There is no example of "this is how to do it." New designs have to emerge and be proven before it is possible to build new NPPs with as much cost certainty as other kinds of power generation.

[godelski]

France still hasn't built a reactor in several decades. Latest started in 91 and finished in 02. The problem is that the parent missed some parts of the story.

[sashank_1509]

I don't think this is an issue of engineer competency. If you gave it to a French company, even they would be bogged down by the US regulatory agency and simply fail.

[diordiderot]

> would be bogged down by the US regulatory agency

Oooooh buddy, you mustn't be familiar with some layers French bureaucracy.

Imagine a unionized DMV.

[inglor_cz]

I am a Czech, so no dog in this particular fight barks for me.

But the French train company SNCF abandoned the Californian high-speed rail project, citing local political dysfunctionality and comparing it unfavorably to ... Morocco.

https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed...

[runarberg]

That is a bit ironic now isn't it. Now that Morocco has high speed rail, but California doesn't.

[pfdietz]

The California high speed rail project never made any sense, even before political dysfunction.

[diordiderot]

Made perfect sense. Uncomfortable length to drive, and end to end trip time would be shorter (and more comfy) on a highspeed train than on a plane (getting to the airport early, security, baggage collection, taxi to the city, etc).

[pfdietz]

It made no economic sense at all.

[otikik]

Ask yourself where does the word “bureaucracy” come from.

[fransje26]

Probably the same problems that are making (rail) infrastructure building 10x more expensive in the US than in Europe.

It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, the problem is that the not-invented-here syndrome compounded by administrative red-tape, powerful counter lobbies and greedy actors make those projects prohibitively expensive.

[lmm]

Who would vote for it?

[dabber]

If you mean the public, I'd expect a lot of people, if it were presented right, considering how often the cost of energy comes up in political discussion

If you mean congress, I think the more important questions are - who would lobby for it? - who would lobby against it?

[robertlagrant]

GreenPeace has a lot of content on their website[0] with questionable anti-nuclear power content. They have been a force for decades for anti-nuclear content, when renewables were in a hilariously worse state than they are today.

[0] https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/nuclear-power

[pfdietz]

Greenpeace had the unmitigated gall to be correct. For this, some people can never forgive them.

Amory Lovins is another example of this phenomenon.

[Turing_Machine]

Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore not only admits that he was wrong about nuclear power, he is now actively pro-nuclear.

https://www.politico.com/story/2008/03/why-a-greenpeace-co-f...

[pfdietz]

That's a story from 2008. The case for nuclear had not so completely fallen apart at that point. But since then PV has become an order of magnitude less expensive, and the "nuclear renaissance" has so spectacularly flamed out in the US.

Moore's claim that replacement of fossil fuels would require nuclear is at this point objectively wrong. I mean, it was unproven then and disproven now.

[robertlagrant]

They had no idea if they were correct, and if more nuclear power had been built then we would be in a much better place globally than we are in now.

Only France, being the archetype of the unmitigated Gaul, actually pushed ahead despite all this Greenpeace pressure and established a great example of lowering CO2 emissions without burning a load of gas. Which to me implies that they weren't correct.

And no one is forgiving them or not. I'm just stating another large force that has been a nuclear power trip hazard for the last 50 years and prevented the economies of scale for nuclear that all forms of power generation need to lower their costs. The question was "who would lobby against?" which I was answering.

[mc32]

Hard to say. The public is divided. Even environmentalists are divided. Some follow the old misinformed guard led by ms. Fonda and you have some more new throwback environmentalists behind nuclear.

It really sticks is my craw that a misinformed but activist actress can torpedo an industry for half a century.

[kwhitefoot]

The industry and governments of the time torpedoed itself by insisting on secrecy and, especially in the case of the UK, doing stupid things like building the reactors on SSSIs (sites of special scientific interest, for instance Torness) instead of building them near where the power was needed.

As someone else said in this discussion: presented properly many people would vote for nuclear power. However, you need to have some substance to the presentation too.

[roomey]

Well... They only know metric, would be a recipe for disaster!

[otikik]

Weapons manufacturers would not benefit from this.