[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t... [2] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
Also that doesn't include design. French design was done in the 60's, and resulted in UNGG prototypes which were abandoned in favor of buying a Westinghouse PWR license. All french reactors are based on that license.
Still an amazing feat, considering it's what provides power to France to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
That's garbage.
- The reason Flamanville 3 takes so much time is precisely because it is a prototype on a new design that never have been produces in series, nor even tested. That supports 100% what is said here: If you want to reduce cost, mass produce.
- Submarines and carrier nuclear reactors are completely different beast that have nothing to do with either Flammanville 3 or the existing nuclear park.
No, this reactor type (EPR) is a mere evolution. Proof: https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/surete/presentation-hi...
Code and digital system re-use in aerospace systems is not uncommon. After all, the fly-by-wire computer system on board the Space Shuttle was derived from the original Apollo flight computer, and they are two very different space vehicles..
A new system requiring extensive testing would have alerted the FAA that something was off, and possibly led to a more costly re-certification they were trying to avoid.
That aircraft should never have been allowed to fly.
To be completely fair, the french nuclear industry is a small world. DCNS (now called Naval Group) did design and manufacture thermal exchanger for civilian nuclear reactors. On the other hand, if I remember correctly, they do work with Areva (now Orano) for some part of the nuclear submarine. Company that can produce parts (even things like tubing or screws) for nuclear reactors are very few, so they often end up working for civilian and military application.
All of this to say that the civilian and military nuclear industry are very much intertwined, feed each other and in many ways, keep each other alive.
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fra...
What I read:
model : first reactor -> last reactor
CP0 : 65 months -> 60 months
CP1 : 73 months -> 64 months
CP2: 56 months -> 79 months
P4: 82 months -> 74 months
P'4: 85 months -> 89 months
N4: 151 months -> 104 months
Yes, I considered the long-term experience gain (columns, not lines: from 65 to 151 and from 60 to 104).
The first nuclear plants were theoretically the most difficult to build as the local industry was less adjusted to building such things, especially specific components.
As those reactor 'models' were very similar (there is no quantum leap) pertinent experience (processes, tooling...) accumulated.
However there was no reduction of 'intensity' (investments, amount of simultaneous building projects, foreseeable projects...) as all this was encompassed by a huge national programme (the 'Plan Messmer').
Therefore it seems that both min and max time to completion should diminish with time.
They're not the same buildings. A N4 is much larger than a CP0, uses different technologies, has more safety features, produces much more power, etc.
To compare with another tech topic, that's like expecting SpaceX to design or build their spaceship faster or cheaper than they designed their falcon. That's unlikely, even though falcon knowledge definitely benefited the design of their new craft.
Not exactly the same but same generation, architecture and design (Westinghouse), slightly (not fundamentally) enhanced. Stating that new features add such a large amount of work (relatively to the total amount) that it compensates for the knowledge gained thanks to previous projects is debatable.
Between the oldest (CP0) and newest (N4) aren't the key differences limited to a same machine and command room shared (CP0) or not (N4) between reactors, scale (CP0's nominal power being lower), and details related to fuel rods and pipes? In which way are they dissimilar to the point of absorbing the effect of gained knowledge and adding such delays?
Even the shiny new EPR is a mere enhancement of the core design dating back ~1970.
Sorry, I don't know enough about SpaceX to have an opinion.
If you push this logic to its end, even a tesla car is a mere enhancement of the electric cars produced in 1900. There is no breaking change like wings, the ability to teleport or supersonic speed.
If you look in details what changed between CP0's and N4's though, there's quite some change [1]: N4's have a double containment enclosure while CPO's have a single one, the vessel contains 400m3 vs. 270m3 and weights almost 50% more, sustains 15 mor bars and 15 more °Cs, and it produces almost 60% more power.
Enough progress for Westinghouse to value Framatome's experience to the point that they became a partner, stopped paying license fees and earned the right to export their design[2].
[1]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrale_nucl%C3%A9aire_en_Fra... [2]: https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1981/01/24/framatome...
The N4 double containment is a mainly quantitative change, as are all the other changes you mentioned: the very architecture remains the same, as do the associated exploitation processes.
Those modifications were big enough to justify seeing the N4 as a "new design" because the French worked hard to master this design, and since 1981 (Nuclear Technical Cooperation Agreement, NTCA) Westinghouse & the French formally exchanged know-how. Moreover Westinghouse didn't work on the N4 and it escaped the Westinghouse license (which expired in 1992). However the very design isn't disruptive. As for this approach efficiency the note #17 seems pertinent.
The newest design ('EPR') also is a mere evolution, as officially stated: https://www.irsn.fr/savoir-comprendre/surete/presentation-hi...
Aka design 1 has 500 pumps, design 2 has 600 and is safer but now there’s more equipment to main and more complex plumbing etc.
The idea here is that maintenance is much, much cheaper than rescue operations. If 100 more pumps let you run for years without a scram, go along and order them.
The point here is the “100 pumps” raise costs and complexity for zero benefit.
Oooooh buddy, you mustn't be familiar with some layers French bureaucracy.
Imagine a unionized DMV.
But the French train company SNCF abandoned the Californian high-speed rail project, citing local political dysfunctionality and comparing it unfavorably to ... Morocco.
https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed...
Freeway expansion is not that much cheaper, and if you factor in the cost of 6 hour drives (or 8 hour bus) over the entire users, I’m not sure freeway expansion comes out in favor.
Airport expansion is also ridiculously expensive. The airspace between San Fransisco and Los Angeles is already super congested. You will probably need to build whole new airports to offer the same capacity as high speed rail. Airport expansion also fails to service the Central Valley, which leads to further economic depression of the millions of people who live there, making this option even more economically ridiculous.
This leave us with do nothing. Sure people can take the 9 hour bus or the 12 hour train and save the carbon footprint, or they can ignore the climate crisis and drive the 6 hours or navigate the dozens of airport combinations. This is by far the cheapest option, but only if you ignore the economic impacts of people choosing not to travel between between population centers in California. Given the cost of travel in California, both in time and carbon emissions, than keeping the travel options as is, is also a ridiculous option.
Perhaps high speed rail is economically ridiculous, but given the options we have, it is still the most sane option.
All the other ways of eliminating CO2 emission, including direct air capture.
Be sure to use realistic estimates of how many people will use this boondoggle.
If you mean congress, I think the more important questions are - who would lobby for it? - who would lobby against it?
It really sticks is my craw that a misinformed but activist actress can torpedo an industry for half a century.
As someone else said in this discussion: presented properly many people would vote for nuclear power. However, you need to have some substance to the presentation too.
Amory Lovins is another example of this phenomenon.
Only France, being the archetype of the unmitigated Gaul, actually pushed ahead despite all this Greenpeace pressure and established a great example of lowering CO2 emissions without burning a load of gas. Which to me implies that they weren't correct.
And no one is forgiving them or not. I'm just stating another large force that has been a nuclear power trip hazard for the last 50 years and prevented the economies of scale for nuclear that all forms of power generation need to lower their costs. The question was "who would lobby against?" which I was answering.
https://www.politico.com/story/2008/03/why-a-greenpeace-co-f...
Moore's claim that replacement of fossil fuels would require nuclear is at this point objectively wrong. I mean, it was unproven then and disproven now.
And the topic of this thread is what lobbying has prevented said nuclear renaissance. You can't use the result of lobbying to prove that the assumptions behind the lobbying were correct.
The objections to this now are mostly "but it hasn't been done yet", which is the last ditch stand of the passive-aggressive denialist (and hypocrite, if that person says nuclear could do it.)
How do you know this? Other than for new designs, nuclear/coal/gas costs and performance are well understood in because we've done them for 50+ years.
> The objections to this now are mostly "but it hasn't been done yet", which is the last ditch stand of the passive-aggressive denialist (and hypocrite, if that person says nuclear could do it.)
This just seems to be ad hominem stuff. Claiming something that hasn't been done as fact is an obvious problem. Attacking the people who say it rather than what's said is, well. Ad hominem, as I say.
...As we can see in our efforts to avoid climate change.
- Healthcare cannot be an efficient free market, where those who can pay most receive the best, and those who cannot pay get nothing. The reasons are pretty obvious. It sort-of-works as an insurance scheme, but currently in the US it's more like a payment scheme (and prices blow up), and in most of the EU is like a redistribution scheme (and amount of care is highly minimized until your condition is really serious).
- Housing in desired areas is heavily influenced administratively by zoning and other stifling norms (hello, SF), and also lack of land in desirable areas (hello, Manhattan). If you agree to live far from bustling megacities or posh suburbs, houses are relatively affordable. (But how are you going to earn the money then?)
- Privacy is not something you want to sell on the market; the whole point is to prevent it. So market forces can't solve it directly. You can buy e.g. an iPhone that gives you more privacy, or use a paid search engine and, a paid email provider, a VPN, etc if you agree to pay more for preserving your privacy; here the markets work well.
- Climate change is again not about trading and competition, because its downsides were not priced into any goods, and mostly are not yet still. Make carbon emission expensive, and the market forces will do their job. E.g. a lot of datacenters are carbon-neutral and powered by solar / wind / hydro just because otherwise the electricity ends up being pretty expensive.
What's your market solution for that one? Making lobbying even more expensive? I guess that's the fixed point of this function
Lobbyists don't stop this. Government chooses to listen to lobbyists. I don't understand why people don't blame the government for government failings.
Giving them free money from taxes and expecting them to not be bribed is not too much to ask.
I don't know how to fix that, but I imagine it's going to require political will from somewhere.
In the end we get the politicians we deserve. If we're too lazy to find the uncorruptable ones, or even run ourselves if all are corrupt, we get corrupt politicians.
EU is doing it, with CBAM. Basically internally trading emissions and taxing carbon at the border.
Healthcare is paralysed by over-regulation. There are lots of easy ways to bring down costs in healthcare that the average entreprenure would love to fix. They don't fix the problems because most of those ways have been made illegal because regulators who adopt a do-no-harm approach that ironically causes more harm than good. In every country I can read the laws of, a doctor and a patient trying to make decisions about healthcare are going to discover that the regulator is in the room 2nd guessing them.
Housing and education, assuming we are talking the US, have been flooded with credit by the government. That happens to be why costs are so high. There is no way the levels of money there are the market-optimal amounts. Every so often the housing market tries to shed debt and force people to buy the things they enjoy and the regulators step in with money printing. I'm pretty sure the US even has such a thing as a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage which is insane. I see figures as high as trillions [0] in the things.
Big tech the reason we need privacy is because sooner or later there will be authoritarians in charge with a lot of political will, using that data. There is a conversation to be had there; the Europeans have crippled their tech sector and privacy legislation was a part of that. Maybe the upside is worth the costs.
Climate change I give you the market would ignore. For the same reason it is ignored politically - nearly nobody thinks it is worth spending real money on to try and fix it.
It's easier and more profitable for a developer to work with a single rich individual to sell them a big overpriced house instead of working hard to make a lot of housing with a small margin (because the purchasers CANNOT AFFORD a high margin).
You know what finally got builders to put up new, affordable housing in my area? Rent control (well, "stabilization"). It means they can only "capture" the cash looking for property in the area by building new property, because otherwise they are limited in the price they can charge. It has caused many area landlords to start huge housing projects because the alternative is a 5% max increase in rent income every year.
At worst, usually you'll do better with 4-6 units on a single block than a single high-value dwelling. People value having anywhere at all to live quite highly, and further amenties than that significantly less (ie. a 4bd house with 2x the space is not worth 2x a single house with half the space)
It's so much easier for the average development group or individual to just build a single mcmansion, where the profit margin can be easily raised with stupid water fixtures or other pointless things, and with clients that are not at all price sensitive. A single moderately expensive mcmansion is probably also easier to get financing for than a competitively priced apartment building where you basically have to hope you keep a good market position for 15 years to start actually making money.
Some of us feel that you can literally wipe the US off the map and it wouldn’t make a single degree’s worth of difference to climate. Some of us also feel that the climate movement is not about climate but about resource redistribution and thus suspect in its real intent.
To solve the problem which an organization was created to solve means to show that the organization is no longer needed. But this means no more work to be paid for!
Ideally it shouldn't be the case that something like building a power plant to produce electricity shouldn't require political will; just willing investors and operators who desire to make a profit.
According to Yves Bréchet [1], former head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, the main difference is not regulation, government or public support. It's something that should speak a lot to the engineers on HN, but is almost always absent in public debates: the lack of technical expertise. Think expert welders, pipe-fitters, boiler makers, etc. The expertise required when making a nuclear power plant is very high, including and especially when it comes to welding, quality of steel, etc.
Costly mistakes were made while welding critical parts of Flamanville 3 for instance, requiring expansive and expensive rework. I don't think Hinkley Point C is faring much better. On the other side of the world China has been building nuclear power plants relentlessly: they have all the expertise needed. If you allow me a slight exaggeration, given France and UK massive de-industrialization over the last few decades, we are now amateurs compared to China.
Again, it's not an issue of regulation. It's just that when you don't build things the know-how gets lost very very quickly. Something that should get hammered in the head of all CEOs/managers/decision maker...
[1] https://www.thinkerview.com/france-la-strategie-du-canard-sa...
It’s not something we (I’m European) want to hear.
It doesn’t mean that public support doesn’t impact projects in Europe (or democracies in general), but it should not be used as an excuse to refuse to look further.
For instance Flamanville got a massive delay because of welding issues. That’s not a regulatory or public opinion issue. That’s an issue with the (lack of) expertise of French welders.
I don’t remember if it is for this one, or for repairs in other French nuclear power plants, but Canadian welders were called to the rescue…
"It was estimated that the plant’s investment cost would rise to between 22 and 23 yuan per watt from an originally budgeted 14 yuan"
So about 60% cost overrun.
You don't even need to oay the engineers more, not only because you have engineers, but because EDF for example can be given attractive enough terms to build and operate overseas, as it has in the UK.
> France and US are allies
Probably not after such an event.
It's not just that NPPs are expensive to build, and unpredictably priced in ways that make the price of power generated uncompetitive. They are also a large and hard to predict liability after they stop generating power and the income from selling that power.
There is no example of "this is how to do it." New designs have to emerge and be proven before it is possible to build new NPPs with as much cost certainty as other kinds of power generation.
It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, the problem is that the not-invented-here syndrome compounded by administrative red-tape, powerful counter lobbies and greedy actors make those projects prohibitively expensive.
A nuclear power plant is:
- a 10 year investment delay (with no return until completed)
- could be cancelled at any moment (high risk)
- with a very uncertain price target (solar/wind + grid storage will probably be half the cost or less of what it is today)
- can't be expanded
- very likely to balloon in cost and be a total financial quagmire
Solar/wind can be scalably purchased, installed, and expanded as needed. The costs will drop continuously, replacement and maintenance is easy, there's no nuclear waste to get rid of, and can very reliably be specced in terms of cost for generation.
Solar and wind is excellent investment for those wanting to compete when supply in the grid is high and prices are low. Nuclear, hydro, storage and fossil fuels are there to compete with supply is low and prices high.
We did 6 batches of 6-to-20 reactors.
Either way, US carriers are probably one of the safest places for nuclear, as they’re mission critical for the life of the carrier and most likely to receive the utmost care… Plus the US has a long history of rubber stamping virtually unlimited funds to solve any military problem, whether the people approve or not. The handling of the waste is still a major concern, but what about the consequences of a torpedo compromising the reactor in warfare?
Most countries, including the US and France, did a build out in the 70's/80's and then basically stopped. France a bit later than the US, but both essentially did the same thing. Checking the wiki list[0] and sorting by operation year you can see 4 things. 1) the vast majority of reactors were built in the 70's, 2) the newest reactor was built in the 90's (operational 2001), 3) the most recent reactors took longer to go into operation (including a few at 16 years, where the 70's build out was typically 6-7 years), 4) almost all 70s/80's reactors are of the same type and same power level (CP1, CP2, P4 REP 1300). We actually see the exact same story in the US (see Watts Bar, ouch).
On the other hand, South Korea didn't do their build out till the mid 80's and continued into the 90's. Then we see the wall hit in the 2000's with the APR 1400. Japan did a bit better and strangely looks like the big success story, especially considering how many reactors such a small country built. Interestingly only Mitsubishi reactors are still operational... Canada is also a good success story but also hasn't built anything since the late 80's (but last reactor was still <10yrs).
Countries like Sweden, started their build out but then there was a hard stop. Sweden had nothing past '85. Germany isn't too far off, but it is also a different story. Ditto for UK.
I intentionally left out China and Russia because different economic structures and because the stories are a bit different even though might appear similar to what I'm discussing at face value (note that my comments are vastly oversimplified, with some things only being alluded to), but it is worth paying attention to the above patterns and think about how the economic structure might reinforce some of those aspects, then think about the western countries different styles during their build out phases (how it actually worked).
The nuclear story is long and complicated. Even this wall of text is oversimplified. This is part of the problem: we like our simple talking points but as speakers are often unwilling to admit that these are only part of the stories or as listeners rebut the speaker as if they are only considering a single factor. It makes real conversation almost impossible and both play a role and build over time. Which is not too dissimilar to a few problems that happened in the nuclear industry.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...