Not sure what privatisations have to do with the problem. My understanding is that it is a combination of a technical problem (corrosion happening at an unexpected pace) and the impact of covid lockdowns which deferred critical maintenance.
Why are most of our public services struggling ? Because over time, they've been handed out to private companies. Unemployment office ? Partly privatized. Tax collection from employers ? Privatized. Healthcare ? Partly privatized, and the beast is being starved so they can privatize it more.
There has not been a single, memorable outcome of a public service being privatized in France and it getting better.
EDF is struggling because the state kept intervening and asking them to shut down future nuclear plants. You can't have specialists if they are retiring and the state destroyed any career prospects due to planning they would shut down plants...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
> EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[6] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[7] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.[8][2]
That's ten years late at 578% the projected cost.
Should be plenty. The Swedish paid off nuclear plants operate around €25/MWh. Lazard similarly puts the range for paid-off nuclear plants at $24-$33/MWh.
It's simply mismanagement of a golden goose.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
Team didn’t deliver? Mismanaged the team. Team failed to deliver because they didn’t do any work? Mismanaged the hiring process. Massive wild fire? Mismanaged forests. Asteroid wipes out all life on Earth? Mismanaged the planetary defense systems. Andor escapes from Narkina 5? Mismanaged imperial prison complex.
If your nuclear plant costs more than $33/MWh to operate then you are doing something wrong and stop trying to blame "the green movement", "privatization" or whatever.
Because I’m pretty sure it’s going to be different from France to America to poland
There, from a source extremely positively biased towards nuclear.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...
Putting the 2012 €23/MWh to €26/MW in an inflation calculator gives €26/MWh to €29/MWh.
Also EDF has been trying to build the EPR in England, Finland and France, and it costed much more to build than budgeted. And someone has to pay the difference. And it seems that this someone is us :) (French tax payers and consumers)
My view is that it is a subsidy for the naval nuclear reactors and weapons programs in UK and France that they choose to pay from a national security perspective. The French and UK public simply gets to eat the costs with barely any say in the matter.
In 2017 this angle was up in the news in the UK. Take the responses as you like.
> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.
> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.
> [...]
> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.
> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.
> [...]
> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.
> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/12/electricity-...
> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.
> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(UK_nuclear_programme)
Privatization in your case is crony capitalism combined with state power to manipulate markets in favor of certain actors. The key enabler in this scheme is government power corrupted by money.
The commonality in all the different areas that are failing -- power, healthcare, homelessness, etc.. --- are the regulatory systems that are grossly distorted by corrupted government interventions.
The main problem with governments and their services today is that there is no real feedback loop and systems without feedback are doomed to fail. You can vote liberal or conservative and nothing changes because they are two wings of the same bird.
I think that's more accurate then the "not TRUE capitalism"/no true Scotsman interpretation.
In this case, we have decided to limit the value of oil a pariah state which attacked a neighbor can sell at. Pretty simple, imo.
As not market pricing? Markets work to find the most efficient economic solution, or at least local maxima. But everything isn’t economics. National security, for instance. So we take economic pain in exchange for national security outcomes. Domestic energy markets are different from international ones.
I'm increasingly convinced that we should strive towards an impure market socialist system because control of large corporations that are more powerful than some countries really doesn't belong in private hands.
And I say impure because some amount of private ownership to capture entrepreneurial spirits is a good idea. But Fortune 500 companies aren't about entrepreneurial spirits.