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by modo_mario 26 days ago
>Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.

Which is a solvable problem. We didn't have these cost and time overruns in the past to this degree. China and other places don't have them much either. I presume they don't set up a board of people and file a tower of paperwork when the lightbulbs in the toilet of an unrelated building are due for replacement but no longer produced.

Imagine if people said renewables were unfeasible and pointed at germany's insane expenditure on it to get only part of the easy output done after decades.

2 comments

There’s an ‘interesting’ dichotomy, echoing the original sentiment:

On the one hand environmental issues from oil and coal are creating an existential pressure that requires mass investment and change as a high public priority.

On the other hand the primary cost drivers of the greenest tech to address oil and gas and industrial process heat usage at scale has paperwork and financing issues that are resolvable by MBAs and some straightforward investment strategies.

Existential threats, paper challenges.

Taken at face value, and considering we have mapped out the physics, these ‘environmentalists’ arguing ad nausea about this online want long term entrenchment of high carbon fuel sources and intimate connections between the global economy and oil despots with no real hope of solving transportation, shipping, aviation, or other major drivers of global energy usage in order to prop up half-solutions for electricity to avoid rational investment or cost-control mechanisms in proven scalable nuclear tech.

Stopping a constant cycle of forced First of a Kind construction, regulatory timebombs unaligned with science, and corporate NIMBY campaigns, is the easiest physics breakthrough humanity will ever have to make. It should be an area of obvious victory, not a show-stopping excuse.

… and, not for nothing, but Oil company PR campaigns a few decades back were explicit: they can’t argue climate change away, they can only confuse the issue, push personal responsibility for national policies, and push half solutions that diffuse actual social opposition. All of this angry knee jerking is following that game plan and the substantial greenwashing propaganda those petroleum giants invested heavily in, to the benefit of rich fossil fuel producers and delay of meaningful changes on our greenhouse emissions.

China has revised down its nuclear build targets and repeatedly had cost and time overruns on nuclear builds, over decades, with different designs. The data just isn't as public.

They've done better recently by building standardised designs repeatedly.

But done even better on wind and solar.

The data is very public for their time spend and verifiably so because they're huge projects and it's quite noticeable when they produce power.

In fact they're one of the main countries pulling the average build time down well below the few notable fuckups in europe recently.

They've also built a number of experimental/new designs and done well.

We did too. And when i read of our fuckups and look at the heaps of nonsensical underlying stories of management and construction in the UK, finland, etc it just seems wild how it can be done like that and be gotten away with.

I've heard of similar in the renewables space (stuff build in contexts/places where it didn't make sense and cost overruns purely for government subsidies) but at least those where individually small fuckups.