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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it can. Nuclear is cheap at scale, not when you build a single prototype every 20 years. You need large countries with large programmes to be successful.

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It doesn’t take 20 years to build. Are we in the west gonna wait for the Chinese to build out Thorium Reactors, are we also gonna wait for high-speed rail to be built out by the Chinese too if it wasn’t for the war with Russia and the Ukraine, the Chinese probably would have built out high-speed rail, all all the way to Europe, by the way, they’ve already built a rail system all the way to Tehran.

And the Chinese have built out a high speed rail system all the way to Ürümqi, China just east of Kazakhstan in western China. (They aren’t messing around).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/9e4...

There are some european success stories in high speed rail too (France). China doesn’t let itself entangled in planning restrictions. US and European countries love over regulation and litigations. That’s a choice, and it comes with a steep cost.

> Nuclear is cheap at scale

Citation needed. We saw at-scale buildout during the 1970s and 1980, did it result in result in order-of-magnitude cost reductions back then?

VS the cost today yes. Nuclear wasn’t seen as a prohibitively expensive form of energy, quite the opposite. South korea and China are making it work. But if you build a new prototype every time and get bogged down in decades of environmental surveys, lawsuits and ever changing over regulations, any infrastructure project becomes prohibitive, whether it is nuclear, high speed rail, or anything else.

It led to onsite cost reductions. But these were negated if the following site had serious design changes. Example is France. Still, compared to today it was much cheaper.

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