Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

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    > In China you get the economy of scale for building nuclear power plants precisely because they are standardized.

Is this really true? Or how can we know it is true? For example: Why is the reason not explained by incredibly cheap construction labor costs compared to other rich countries?

Related: UAE had zero nuclear power plants before the Barakah nuclear power plant[1] opened starting in 2020. They built 4x Korean APR-1400s for only 32B USD. That seems incredibly cheap. How did they do it? I assume (near) slave labour prices for construction workers, like most other stuff built in that country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant

How you raise finance is incredibly important for nuclear costs.

Higher lending rates can easily double the final cost and they multiply with any time delays.

That particular build had government finance from both the host and the building government.

Brandolini, is that you calling? There is so much bullshit here that I don't know where to start. The waters are murky...

    > How you raise finance is incredibly important for nuclear costs.

You really think the UAE, that has a sovereign wealth fund with assets of more than 2.5T (<-- trillion!) USD needs to borrow money to build nuclear reactors? Plus, Korea buys heaps of oil and gas from UAE. There are so many ways to "settle this bill".

> You really think the UAE, that has a sovereign wealth fund with assets of more than 2.5T (<-- trillion!) USD needs to borrow money to build nuclear reactors?

No, I'm answering your question as to why their build costs are surprisingly low. They didn't finance at the rate that other builds did and finance related costs can be 2/3rds of the total cost of a nuclear plant.

Last I checked labor was 15-30% for such projects, so it could help but only so much

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