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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

If it's just about regulation why hasn't China (or anyone) broken the stagnation? It's unwarranted regulations in every country?

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Or France, the most nuclear friendly country in the world since forever. Yet, they are slowing nuclear power to favour eolic and solar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France).

Actually China seems to be the only country where nuclear is alive and thriving. There were some hiccups for some years due to lack of experience with 3G designs, as well as US sanctions (forcing some companies to drop France's AP-1000 design and to design their own), but they have now solved those problems and are ramping up nuclear fast because they are serious about 2030 peak carbon target. Source: David Fishman, who's an expert on the energy sector in China. You can find a lot of info on his Twitter, for example https://twitter.com/pretentiouswhat/status/12939610958922792...

UAE are building nuclear plants as well.

I believe the UAE's plants are being built by the south Koreans, who have been the biggest builders this century. Unfortunately even with so many plants being built south Korea has been unable to lower costs.

In Korea, around the date of the deal with the UAE, there was quite a scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal

UAE's plants are, certainly in retrospect and probably earlier, a mistake. They produce output at something like 5x the cost per kWh of what utility scale solar can achieve there (about $0.013/kWh for large utility scale solar). In the time between the process to build those plants was started and when they came online, solar has crashed in cost by nearly an order of magnitude.

No, China bets on renewable energy way more than on nuclear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31466725

Note: the AP1000 isn't French: its a Westinghouse reactor. This Westinghouse division filed for Chapter 11, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Company

The French one is the EPR (European Pressurized Reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

2 of them were built in China. The project reached 60% overcost, was 5 years late and according to the French financial Court of Audit may not reach the break-even point. Then one of the reactors had an incident and is shutdown since mid-2021. Not sure all this is "thriving"... https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/31/asia/taishan-nuclear-plant-in...

China is doing it, whatever the regulation might be they are building those reactors. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

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