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The question with cost overruns is always why. In the US, litigation is generally the reason why. Is that the same in Canada?
It's more than litigation issues in the U.S. The EPC (general contractors) that build nuclear power plants in the U.S. have generally lost the technical ability to build such complex engineering projects. The major contractors and subcontractors (CB&I, S&W, Westinghouse, etc) have all gone bankrupt and the people who built our original fleet never properly transferred their knowledge to the next generation of workers. We should all be embarrassed by this. We likely would be bot embarrassed and angry if it was even acknowledged as a problem. Instead we hear about nebulous "legislation and regulation". Those are certainly part of the problem, but only one part.
I wonder if Canada fares better. I kind of doubt it. It seems like the Chinese and maybe the French are the only ones left who can handle these types of projects.
Modular plants are probably much more sensible efficiency wise, and US hasn't lost the ability to build thermal power plants.
E.g. the Danish design that provides 50 MWt through a molten salt loop from a module the size of a shipping container.
Stack 20 of these in a row in concrete coffins underground, and you have 1 GWt of heat. Do people really think it'd be more expensive than giant pressure reactors in giant containment domes that can melt down and need lots of infrastructure for safety?
The molten salt modules can't overheat, and if they're punctured the salt solidifies under 600°C or so.
As if things buried underground in reinforced concrete were at risk of getting shot through.
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Maybe but the reason why that doesn’t exist is because litigation made it prohibitively expensive to build in the first instance resulting in depreciating the value of the goodwill.
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IMO, they were forced into bankruptcy. After Three Mile Island, the regulators simply refused to allow any new nuclear plants to be constructed. See the wikipedia list of US nuclear plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_States
There's about five US nuclear plants started every year, up until 1978. Then there's a little excitement at Three Mile Island in 1979, where nobody is hurt. No nuclear plants begin construction until 2013.
How would Ford survive if the US government decreed that they could not produce any new cars for 30 years, they could only go on with cars in production in 1979? What use is there in having skills for nuclear power plant design and construction if they're de facto illegal to use for 30 years? And that doesn't include the insane forced cost overruns regulation imposed, requiring nuclear plants cope with physically impossible engineering failures, amongst other abuses:
Regulation was the assassin, gun and bullet while Westinghouse was the corpse on the floor.
Did you happen to see the Safe Enough guest book review on ACX? I thought it was a neat look into the genesis of this regulatory regime.
I did read that. But I think it's silly to go to huge such huge efforts to reduce risk in nuclear energy while we pump out enormous amounts of air pollution with coal. Tens of thousands die every year in the US alone, millions worldwide... and people are worried about potential risks from freak events? We should worry about large, real, experienced dangers rather than small, unreal, conjecture-based dangers.
I see Fukushima and raise dam failures - those actually kill people in huge numbers. One dam failure in China made Fukushima look like a joke - 11 million homeless, 171,000 dead. Yet nobody scrambles to prevent dams being built, blanket-bans them by law.
As for the worst case scenarios... there's excessive hysteria about radiation. The methodology is dubious at best, linear no-limit threshold models are just a guessing game of extrapolating from real danger to effects that can't even be observed. It's unscientific and defies reason - should we build giant shades to blot out the sun (a major source of radiation)? If there's no safe threshold for nuclear-derived radiation, why should there be a safe threshold for UV (which again kills orders of magnitude more than nuclear energy ever has every single year). The cost of a major nuclear disaster is a social construct, people feeling like they ought to evacuate, be stressed or expensively clean up despite the effects being small. There's zero existential risk as well.
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Aren't Koreans pretty good too?
Better.
Best prices in the world, though given that it's Korea it could be a mirage.
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It's basically exactly what happened to the UK nuclear submarine program.
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Mostly because they are built at such a low rate. If Canada were to send four rockets into space and use custom built Canadian ones, they would cost a fortune and be delayed for years. Spacex is cheap because spacex launches several times a month. The nuclear industry in the west is stuck between silly levels of regulation, such as the decades of fighting over how to store waste and a lack of an industrial base.
If we are actually going to get somewhere with nuclear, we need to build 10+ reactors a year in the west.
And they need to be of similar type, to get Nth of a kind benefits. As one person once put it, the problem with the US nuclear industry is that "In France, they have hundreds of types of cheese, but only two types of reactors. In America, this is reversed."
I'll recommend Where are my damn learning curves? as a look into that topic. (I'll also recommend the rest of that blog in general, even though it's not Motte-like in its focus)
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A combination of incompetence and low-key corruption is traditional in Canadian government projects; presumably the actual nuclear engineers will be pretty competent in this case, but the govt drones managing them probably won't -- which will allow the corporate overlords to extract a little graft.
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