> Median construction time required for nuclear reactors worldwide oscillated from around 84 months to 117 months, from 1981 to 2019 respectively.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/712841/median-constructi...
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/a-new-coal-fired-pow...
At least one of the reasons why solar and wind really got off the ground is because the marginal cost of one more installation is not very high. Panels on the roof may not be the most efficient, but they are actually feasible for a homeowner to purchase and install.
The nuclear industry will be lucky if its able to pull off enough construction to replace reactors that age out. There's no chance of nuclear becoming a backbone of our new grid, when we would need to produce 400GW of new nuclear. The napkin math does not work out.
However, renewables and storage are scaling their production at just barely a high enough rate, if we continue on the same exponential growth curves we have been on for the next decade.
Hopefully production will scale even faster, now that solar is the cheapest form of new energy.
And storage is quickly getting solved. California has gone from almost nothing to more than a GW of storage in a year, and is adding more GW at the moment. Even the "free market" in Texas is choosing to add many GW of storage, even more GW of solar and wind, and almost no new natural gas. And in the US, the majority of new solar projects include storage now, because for a long time there has been more DC production power than ability to convert it to AC, and a few hours of storage makes financial sense because storage has gotten so cheap. As it gets cheaper, there will be bigger an bigger amounts of storage added to every renewables project, on site.
Meanwhile we can't build nuclear in Western countries anymore. France can't, the US can't, the UK is likely going to fail.
The problem in the nuclear industry is that they are stuck on getting even first of a kind plants out. The idea of scaling up to hundreds of GW in the next few years is a pipe dream for the us and Europe. Maybe China will be able to build their 150 planned reactors, but even if they do they will be building far far more renewables than that.
The production capacity of modern Western economies is very well suited to wind, solar, and storage. It is absolutely awful at massive construction projects, like nuclear. Construction productivity has barely changed at all since the 1970s, while other fields' productivity has soared. We should take advantage of that.
And this ain't even talking about the new types of super cheap long duration storage that have high energy/power ratios. There's iron batteries in both traditional solid forms and in flow forms. Noe that the market need is becoming apparent, there are new chemistries being developed all the time that are suitable for stationary storage but not as well suited for cars and other mobile applications. Which is fantastic, as we can then reserve all that quickly growing production capacity for transport.
France is around 70% nuclear and 15% renewable (mainly hydro). Maintaining the same level of emissions would mean going to 85% renewable, not 75%.
> we can get to 75% renewables without storage.
Not unless we build 50GW of fossil fuel plants. Is it what you suggest?
France has no need to transition when it comes to electricity. We're already almost as low emission as possible so there is no urgency. What we need is a medium term plan, because the plants may start being decommissioned in around 10 years (unless ASN give them the right to run for ten more years, which isn't completely impossible: in the US, some plants from the same technology (PWR) is allowed to run until 70 years!).
And btw, solar in France makes zero sense except in the Mediterranean region, the weather is just not good enough…
From your perspective, when the sun isn't shinning, you just don't get paid. But from the grid perspective, when you don't produce electricity somebody else has to do it! And since the sun isn't shining that much, the grid owner has to have another power supplier most of the time (or batteries).
The timeline ballooning as all external parties take their time weighing in and covering their asses, and costs associated with idling construction waiting for same, are getting ridiculous.
Either it's a priority (in which case everyone should treat it as such), or it's not (in which case we should accept we just can't build non-priority projects over a certain scale).
Other than the fact that the federal government fining the federal government has no actual effect, all that making a high-legal stakes response timeline with impossible to concretely define completeness requirements would do is increase litigation and litigation costs around such projects.
If the construction requirements of 1980 are sufficient for a plant operating ten years from now that came online in 1980 then the construction requirements of this year should be sufficient for a plant operating ten years from now even if it hasn't come online yet. So the obvious fix for this is to use the requirements as of the day construction begins rather than the day it ends.
The plants that have had issues were known to be the oldest and most vulnerable ones.
Tihange is a good example of the same political inaction that gave us this climate crisis. It has nothing to do with cutting corners, nor about "designing and running these things". It is (political) complacency, not mismanagement of the plant that's the main problem.
If you forbid fossil fuels at a point in time (say 2030), the energy market will know ahead when demand will exceed supply. There aren't better incentives avilable if you want the mega projects built on time
In some cases EDF even planned building more reactors from the very beginning, for example at the nuclear power plant of Belleville-sur-Loire: everything was planned for 4 reactors, but only 2 were built. So they can build two extra right there, no need to find a new site.
The current not so small problem is that EDF needs to learn how to build nuclear reactors again. That's what they are currently doing, at great cost and great delays... But if the political will is there, they can start to break ground quite literally tomorrow.
Source: chapter 6 of “Nuclear Power: A Brief Introduction.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
The stories in the US about VC Summer and Vogtle construction failures do not point to government regulation being the problem, they point to basic flaws throughout the construction process. Design of the AP1000 that is "unconstructable" according to the EPC contractor, who then goes on to build their own unproven design, which then requires an external check. The problem wasn't that the design had to be certified by the government, the problem was that design wasn't in touch with construction.
We used to be able to build things quite quickly. E.g. The Bay Bridge was built in 5 years for $77 million (~$1.5 Billion today) in 1931-1936. This is not ground breaking, but law passed to bridge opening.
Just replacing the Eastern span cost $6.5 Billion and took ~18 years to build (1995-2013) from law passed to section opening.
Decisions have consequences.