Summary
France’s Flamanville 3 nuclear reactor, its most powerful at 1,600 MW, was connected to the grid on December 21 after 17 years of construction plagued by delays and budget overruns.
The European Pressurized Reactor (EPR), designed to boost nuclear energy post-Chernobyl, is 12 years behind schedule and cost €13.2 billion, quadruple initial estimates.
President Macron hailed the launch as a key step for low-carbon energy and energy security.
Nuclear power, which supplies 60% of France’s electricity, is central to Macron’s plan for a “nuclear renaissance.”
At least this one is on the coast so it can still run when the rivers dry up.
But holy shitsnacks 3½ times slower than planned and 4 times more expensive. No wonder no new nuclear power plants have been built in a generation when the ones coming online now were all delayed by a generation.
4 times budget sounds more than it is. You have to underbid to actually get contracts for construction and then it also depends on what was actually missing in the specification.
Big projects are never on budget because the budget is just an arbitrary number of lowballing the best case estimate
Also any project that takes longer than the initial estimate will be overbudget, not only because you are paying local workers for longer (fairly good for the economy) but simply because inflation has happened more since the project started.
Yeah, also financing cost for equipment and material sitting around which usually comes as a cost to the contractor.
… but we make decisions about economic viability on that basis??
The hope of these new small modular reactors is they can cut the time down.
Less land, mass manufactured in a factory and shipped to location.
That should help with estimated costs being closer to real costs.
Even if they’re still expensive, being able to better plan and predict things is huge.
Except that’s all been tried and promised before. The concept of SMRs is nothing new. It’s been tried again and again, every few years since the 1970s. It’s never panned out, and the promised savings from mass production of small reactors never materializes.
It might have been promised for awhile, but we’re finally at the point of certain plans getting government approvals. It takes time. We might start seeing some finally start to get built in the 2030’s
Edit: This ones says 2029 operational, but see, it wasn’t even certified until 2023, and this is the first SMR certified in the USA. Its taken forever to get SMRs certified.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-small-modular-reactor-design
The full price is still less than 1/4 of Doge Coin’s market cap.
It doesn’t help when all the senior employees from last time you built a reactor have retired and anyone who hasn’t retired was pretty junior the last time around. For projects where you have to get everything right the first time, so can’t just try things to see what works, it’s devastating to stop doing them if you ever might need to start again.
Yeah, that’s the whole joke.
In my mother’s hometown, they finally decided which architect would redesign the townhall after it’s roof burnt down. Five years ago. And this is a rich town. France is fucking useless at getting shit done fast. It’s depressing really. This plant finally getting built is a fucking miracle!
Olkiluoto unit 3 took 18 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant?wprov=sfti1
It’s the same French EPR tech and the whole project was plagued with mistakes because the French wanted to cut corners and just get it built as fast as possible.
Sounds like pretty much every software project I’ve ever worked on
The difference here was that STUK (the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear safety org) isn’t a backwater shop like the French kinda assumed. It’s a world-class setup that consults around the world.
They caught so many mistakes that the project went ridiculously over time and budget. The French crew had kids born and go to school in Finland before it was over - it was supposed to be a few years of expat experience 😆
Yeah. I love the French, our dear EU brothers and sisters, but just don’t buy a nuclear power plant from them.
They have a lot of them and they work perfectly well, who are you buying it from? The USA? Germany?
Microsoft is restarting 3 Mile Island…
Hinkley point in the UK. Massive overruns,built by the French
Thing is there’s only four manufacturers of reactors in Europe:
- French/Japanese Framatome
- Italian/Chinese Ansaldo Energia
- Czech/Korean Doosan Skoda
- German/Russian Nukem
The 44% Chinese part of Ansaldo and the 100% Russian ownership of Nukem is probably not doing either company any favors. That leaves you with Doosan Skoda and Framatome. Considering a nuclear reactor project isn’t build in less than a decade, and given the choice between a company that has built several modern reactors and a company that is first in line for a visit from dear old uncle Vlad and haven’t commissioned a reactor in 22 years, I’d say that the French is the best bet.
So that the French built the reactor is only logical. That it got delayed to the extreme, that’s just what happens when you don’t buy a reactor of the rack.
All nuclear plants get over budget or the political party doesn’t seem to make the budget accepted.
So why throw cash at them?
1.6 GW, cool, but everyone knows all you need is 1.21 GW
Those were JW
Jigga what?
Nuclear plant construction delayed? Budget overrun? Even in one of the most nuclear developed countries in the world? Wooooow, what a surprise!!
They aren’t burning coal like Germany? That’s how you go “clean”…
By pouring endless amounts of money down the drain? Great strategy.
fuck yeah
Aaaaand, the objective it to add 1000 new reactors in the next 25 years… we ded
They better retool their power plants to use something other than uranium. Last I read, we had about a century’s worth at the current rate of mining.
Is that including all known deposits? Or just the amount in current mines?
It’s based on what can actually be used.
The world’s present measured resources of uranium (6.1 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium
(Note this is a *pro-*nuclear power organization.)
New technology may change that. We were once told that the oil in the Canadian tar sands was not economical enough to extract and now they’re extracting it. The paper also discusses the possibility of thorium as a fuel source, although it has yet to see commercial viability.
As-is, and with current reactors, we don’t have much we can use. Relying on new technology to change that could be a poor gamble.
Don’t worry, the consultants are already on the task and invoicing hundreds of millions for their hard work.
No ETA but will keep you posted… in about 12 years.
Therein lies the problem.
