[loeg]

Pretty much all of the dozens (56!) of reactors France built in the 70s took 5-6 years between construction and operation. How much weight do you give those dozens of builds, vs a couple one-offs? Yes, the fact that we've waited 40 years to build another single reactor is part of the problem. But it gets faster if you don't do crazy one-off designs and you get some experience building more than, you know, one.

[myrmidon]

If your hypothesis was true (cost overruns and delays are caused by lack of recent build experience in every western nation, and would immediately vanish if we started building more reactors) then we would expect to see the same clear trend of decreasing build time with experience in the past.

But in fact early reactors (e.g. Marcoule, or Tricastin) got built faster than the later ones (=> possibly because Chernobyl happened, and everyone reevaluated risk). So that hypothesis is clearly wrong.

And even if build times of under a decade were a realistic target for US/Europe (which I see no indication for)-- how many plants would we need to build first to hit those improvements, in your opinion? If we needed just a single full planning/construction iteration, then we could expect those miraculous 5-year-on-budget-reactors to come online in like 2050. Thats basically the best case scenario (!!). Might as well wait for fusion reactors then (that was sarcasm; fusion reactors are gonna be irrelevant in fighting climate change for exactly the same reasons; too much complexity, too expensive, too slow).

[loeg]

Vogtle actual costs are already competitive with actual renewables costs, and build times are vastly better than the 25 year timeline you're calling a "best case scenario" here.

[myrmidon]

> Vogtle actual costs are already competitive with actual renewables costs

No. At $160/MWh? Maybe competitive with renewable costs 15 years ago. Most certainly not with renewable cost now (and those still trend down).

> build times are vastly better than the 25 year timeline you're calling a "best case scenario" here

That timeline is for finishing one plant at currently speed, and then planning and finishing a ton of new reactors within 5 year buildtimes directly after. But I see zero confidence that this is actually realistic, not even from the the companies that just finished building Vogtle...

[loeg]

Fully loaded renewable costs (with sufficient storage or gas generation to achieve firm production) is over $100/MWh, yes.