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Given the nuclear industry’s history of negative learning by doing, even during the boom years, I have a hard time seeing how ”scale” will solve it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...



The obvious problem with studies like these is when they're from the period in history when the attitude towards regulatory costs was that the cost/benefit of any particular rule should be ignored and the total number of rules should only increase over time. Especially so when the study is from France, where these attitudes are even more entrenched and on top of that the program is centrally planned -- not the thing known for bringing efficiency -- and where higher efficiency is regarded as a cost because you're losing union jobs or lucrative contracts and the one paying is the taxpayer or the ratepayer, who has less influence over the government than the unions or construction companies.

Whereas what you want is multiple companies building these things on an assembly line, where you can plop the components out of a truck already approved and ready to be turned on.


The study also shows the same pattern in the US.

> Whereas what you want is multiple companies building these things on an assembly line, where you can plop the components out of a truck already approved and ready to be turned on.

How many trillions in handouts from tax payer money to get there?

Renewables and storage deliver that dream unsubsidized today.


> The study also shows the same pattern in the US.

The modern US where a negligible number of reactors are being built, or the US in the period of the regulatory changes that accompanied the Cold War when everyone was afraid of nuclear bombs and then The China Syndrome and Chernobyl?

If you want it to mean anything you need data from when the regulatory environment isn't increasing in hostility over time during the measurement period.

> How many trillions in handouts from tax payer money to get there?

It's a loan at an interest rate higher than the government itself is paying to issue the bonds, i.e. the taxpayer is making money from this.

Also, the main issue isn't funding it, it's making it cost less, e.g. by moving most of the approvals from being needed at each and every site to the factory where components are being mass produced.

> Renewables and storage deliver that dream unsubsidized today.

Then why does the price per kWh that consumers are paying keep going up instead of down?


I love how it's always someone elses fault that nuclear power never delivered on its promise. Despite handout after handout trying to get the industry to work.

> It's a loan at an interest rate higher than the government itself is paying to issue the bonds, i.e. the taxpayer is making money from this.

This assumes the risk is zero. Which given e.g. Virgil C. Summer is not the case.

> Then why does the price per kWh that consumers are paying keep going up instead of down?

Depends on where you are in the world. In Europe most of the recent price increases are coming from fossil energy becoming expensive.

The ETS system is making coal power expensive and running a peaker on LNG is extremely expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emissions_Tradi...

So now we're seeing large swings from extremely cheap renewable electricity to expensive fossil based.




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