Comment by SECProto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SECProto | Hacker News Reader

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> What sort of culture war or regulatory arguments could be made to explain France's failures with the EPR design, that so closely mirror the US's failure with the AP1000 design in the past decade?

Nuclear plants are massive, complex, tightly regulated capital projects. These require strong project management capacity. Most Western democracies have spent decades systematically outsourcing project management to various consultants (who are great for reducing cost on small projects with short timelines, but not good for major projects with a lot of schedule and budget uncertainty). Couple that with the fact that the US and France haven't built a nuclear plant in decades (France started two in the 1984-2007 gap), causing the loss of most institutional knowledge. I think these are the root cause of price and schedule escalations.

Same problems have caused cost and schedule escalations in the Site C dam and the Lower Churchill hydro project in Canada. High speed rail in California has similar issues. Similar causes have affected the Berlin airport, and the Stuttgart railway station reconstruction.

> Stuttgart railway station reconstruction

I lived there for some time so I know a lot of details about this; and I have to disagree with your statement.

This wasn't a lack of knowledge - quite the contrary. "Stuttgart 21" (the core in Stuttgart itself, not the smaller sub-projects in the surroundings) is nothing more than a prestige project and most of the local politicians and a lot of the business folks wanted it, e.g. to have some new area for buildings and to have something special in Stuttgart to attract people, tourists, plus more advertising for the city.

But they ignored _all_ warnings about the unsuitable rock layers for an underground rail station, the shortcomings of the rescue system in the tunnels itself, the too steep slope of the platforms, the decreased amount of trains, the accessibility problems, the water problems, and so on - which all became clear in very early discussions, as some folks (including railway enthusiasts, as well as scientists such as structural engineers and geologists) formed a small club against the project and also did a lot of lectures to inform the public. This all was years before it even was announced widely.

Later all of these warnings came to be true, hence the multiple cost explosions.

I agree, and think that this is one of the primary causes of nuclear failing.

Advanced economies have higher labor costs, but far lower manufacturing costs. Nuclear construction requires massive amounts of highly skilled labor, not only because of the miles upon miles of piping that require super-high precision welding that will last in extreme conditions for decades but even down to things like concrete pours.

My hypothesis on nuclear is that it only makes sense for a very very narrow window of economic advancement, where labor costs are still low, but there is still enough technological capacity to design and build a hugely complex beast of a project. But I don't have any numbers to back my hunch yet...

The US Navy has been training 20 year old kids to operate the things for almost 70 years. I was one of them. Westinghouse and GE build and refuel, and decommission the existing nuclear reactors in the fleet today.

It’s hard work, but we have the knowledge and workers to run these things and build them today. We still build nuclear reactors in the states, they’re just on submarines and aircraft carriers.

There’s a lack of political will to devote MIC dollars to power production, but it’s not like nobody knows how to do it.

Military reactors are different from civilian reactors in at least two ways: 1) military fuel would not be allowed in civilian hands, and 2) military reactors have essentially an infinite budget, and have few economic constraints.

The challenges of using military reactors in other settings go far beyond questions of "political will"

I've also heard anecdotal accounts that military reactors are still maintenance nightmares, and their lack of public nuclear accidents is less due to doctrine and more to the fact that these reactors spend their life in a classified military environment floating in international water; AKA easy to cover up

The lack of accidents is due to a lack of accidents. Part of it is training, part of it safety interlocks. There are near misses but nothing that would really scare anyone who knew how these things work.

The Russian reactors on the other hand… let’s just say a lot of those guys die of cancer.

They aren’t maintenance nightmares for technical reasons. More for regulatory reasons. Still, they always manage to get underway on time.

The unlimited budget and the fuel comes from political will so I don’t understand your point.

The economic concerns and weapons concerns may have political aspects, but the bigger part are the material differences.

Usually when people say "political will" it's about making a choice without serious other constraints. There are incredible constraints on pricing and danger that go beyond politics when it comes to military style reactors.

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