France's most powerful nuclear reactor connected to grid after 17-year build

For additional context, one of the reason for the delay and cost increase was the absurdly complex design due to French and German companies trying to collaborate on a new design as Germany was turning anti-nuclear, which culminated with Germany deciding to stop nuclear energy after the Fukushima Daiichi event.
Another big reason is the knowledge loss due to almost one generation without any reactor built in between.

Now do Georgia's Vogtle reactors 3 and 4, which came in at 34 billion for 2 x 1200mw plants, 21 billion over the original 14 billion estimate, and took over 14 years to build, 8 years behind schedule.
Im glad these powerplants finally got built. They will help, but nuclear is just not reasonable anymore. Its a slow, expensive tech, especially when we are making such leaps and bonds with solar/battery.
- Even if wind and solar make huge progress, they will likely never be as efficient regarding raw materials efficiency and land use. Land use is the main contributor to biodiversity loss.
  I don't think peremptory opinions about technologies are going to help. We should use what ever technology is the most reasonable and sustainable for each specific location.
- It's slow expensive tech because we don't invest in it.
  Every technology is slow and expensive when you have nearly an entire generational gap in knowledge and experience.
  You'll know that I'm not saying solar and wind are not cheaper, they all exist in a different capacity and fill in the gaps they best fit.
- Nuclear reactors have always been subsidized by the military. Solar and wind are so much cheaper than anything that came before.
- Solar is not sustainable. Maybe one day but today's panels will all have to be replaced in a few decades. For now it's a way to bridge the needed to go fully nuclear.
with Germany deciding to stop nuclear energy after the Fukushima Daiichi event.
Hey, you don't know where the next tsunami will happen. Have to be proactive.
The real irony being that all Japanese reactors shut down due to the quake as designed, and the tsunami wouldn't have been a factor had money not been saved by shortcutting backup generator protection from flooding in a FLOOD ZONE.
- had money not been saved
  This just serves as a lesson to the "failsafe technology" crowd: That also involves failsafe humans. Those, to the best of my knowledge, have yet to be invented.
  Oh and relatedly some German reactor ran for decades without a backup power generator. It was there, present, physically, that is, but noone bothered to check whether it actually worked. Merkel justified her flip-flop on the nuclear exit (shortly before Fukushima, she delayed the exit that SPD+Greens had decided on) by saying, more or less, "If the Japanese can't do it we can't do it either" but if she had been paying attention, it should've been clear that we couldn't do it. That became clear when the first SPD+Green coalition moved responisibity for nuclear safety from the ministry for economy to that for the environment, run by a Green, and they made a breakfast out of all that shoddy work that the operators had done. Oh the containment vessel is riveted... figures they put the rivets in the wrong way. Shut it down, have fun re-doing every single one of them before starting it up again.
  Thus, my conclusion: The only people you can trust to run nuclear reactors safely are people who don't want nuclear reactors to exist in the first place.
- It's totally logical even aside from the economics. The consequences are too great, which is why nuclear plants are uninsurable. You think this French plant and Vogtle were expensive? Imagine if they had to be insured like everything else in our society. But they can't, because no insurance company is large enough. By default the public ends up footing that cost to the tune of trillions.
- Bro, THE FUCKING BACKUP DIESEL GENERATORS FOR THE PLANT WERE BELOW SEA LEVEL.
  Make it make sense. If those generators had been above sea level, well probably above 100-year tsunami levels, we likely would not have seen the plant catastrophically fail.
It's always Germany's fault when it comes to nuclear, isn't it?
- Probably not anymore, I think they do very good as just being buyers of it and outsourcing its issues to their neighbors.

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.

Some anti nuclear groups do everything they can to slow down nuclear builds, putting as many road blocks in the way as possible. Then when it's slow they say: see, building nuclear plants is slow!
- Did the anti nuclear people inflate the cost fourfold, too?
- Politics are part of the system though. But if strategic supply of oil, gas, coal from undemocratic regimes was simply off the table, constitutionally forbidden and all that, I think nuclear energy would suddenly become more competitive. Because the financing of such groups would suffer.
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.
- ... but we make decisions about economic viability on that basis??
- My state has been building a new interstate highway in segments for the last 1.5 decades and for the segment nearest me the main construction contract was awarded to a major french company. The french company thought the project was an upfront full payout, but the state had it set up as a piecemeal payment system based on hitting specific objectives. Upon finding this out the company halted all work and abandoned the job until the state took over the project 18 months later.
  This reminds me of that.
As others have mentioned, it isn't for a practical reason. Nuclear is not that difficult to build. Look at China. Certain groups (funded by dirty energy companies) have pushed an idea that nuclear isn't safe and had more and more bureaucracy and regulations pushed onto it. Sure, some is needed, as it's also needed for other sources. Nuclear has been strategically handicapped though because they know it'd destroy their business if it's able to compete on a level playing field.
- The most unimaginably, but historically stupid thing was "green" activists protesting against nuclear power and for coal and gas.
  And yes, nuclear power is very efficient. What makes it most efficient is the ability to very quickly regulate output, the improved logistics, and smaller reliance on beheading, culture-erasing, genocidal, revisionist savages getting everywhere.
- That said, now that solar and wind are cheaper, conservative politicians are finally pushing for nuclear, because 17 more years of building at 4 times the budget means more fossil fuels in the meantime compared with spending those government funds on solar and wind.
- Certain groups (funded by dirty energy companies) have pushed an idea that nuclear isn't Safe
  Nuclear isn't safe. You should still not pick mushrooms in parts of germany because it isn't. It's an inherently dangerous technology, which you can only try to mitigate.
  Nuclear has been strategically handicapped though because they know it'd destroy their business if it's able to compete on a level playing field.
  Nuclear can only work because it is heavily subsidized. If it had to compete on a level playing field, not a single plant would ever have been built in history, as they are uninsurable on the free market and no investor would touch them with a stick without huge government guarantees.
  It's the most expensive form of power generation there is, and in 2024 with renewables as good as they are it is just plain unnecessary to sink resources into this dead end.
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.
I encourage you to take a look at any infrastructure project.
Going over budget and past deadlines is normal.
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 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.
The full price is still less than 1/4 of Doge Coin’s market cap.
4 times for expensive is not too bad, big projects usually overrun. It's even God considering the time overrun, which is shocking.
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?

Good. Germany made a huge mistake for themselves and for all of Europe in shutting down their nuclear plants.

Except they were basically beyond design life.
And every new plant comes decades late and 4x the original budget.
- But they planned on replacing it with natural gas. Not to mention that it was supposed to be Russian gas. Sweden pays for the shitty decisions in Berlin.
They have cheap Russian gas so who nee...

1.6 GW, cool, but everyone knows all you need is 1.21 GW

Those were JW
- Jigga what?

Seems like a waste investing so much in the U-235 cycle. Aren't the thorium and U-238 cycles better? Like, more compact footprint, simpler design, more scalable, doesn't need to be located near a large body of water etc.

France doesn't care about fuel cycles which don't produce plutonium.
- The U-235 fuel cycle produces way more plutionium than the U-238 cycle, though.
  EDIT: Aw, fuck, I typed it wrong. U-238 produces more plutonium than U-235. My criticism still stands.
Thorium is still umproven, and was even more so in 2007. Until (or if?) the Chinese TMSR LF1 really takes off no private company will risk trying a thorium reactor
- It's not unproven. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/thorium#%3A%7E%3Atext=Reactors+able+to+use+thorium%2Coperational+service+at+some+point.

Nuclear plant construction delayed? Budget overrun? Even in one of the most nuclear developed countries in the world? Wooooow, what a surprise!!

Fossil fuel exec calls up his criminal friends in whatever legislative bodies he can reach "hey yeah I need this delayed and I need it to cost more in order to make my own business plans look less stupid and toxic. I don't fucking care how you do it, rubber stamp some no bid contracts for your cousin in law's consulting firm or something. Of course your family can expect some very lucrative careers, incidentally..."

Renewables are far cheaper and can be built faster and if they malfunction, no one is in danger.

France already has enough Nuclear to deal with no-sun and no-wind phases (if they work properly, which is the other problem with nuclear energy in France)...

So, there is literally no reason to waste tax payer money and time like this and to force yourself to import material from Russia. Just build renewables until we get fusion energy...

Even when disasters like Chernobyl are included, nuclear energy kills fewer people per Watt than any of the alternatives. E.g. dams burst and people like building towns downstream of hydro plants. Even with wind where it's basically only deadly due to accidents when installing and repairing turbines (e.g. people falling off, fires breaking out too abruptly to climb down), it happens often enough that it ends up more dangerous than nuclear. Burning gas, coal and biomass all work out much deadlier than renewables and nuclear, but if your risk tolerance doesn't permit nuclear, it doesn't permit electricity in any form.
- If the premisse is to avoid possibly every death, photovoltaic on the ground, e.g. on fields (not on houses) would probably be the least deadly solution.
It's not either or situation, I hate this logic. Build both renewable and nuclear when the sun don't shine. Nuclear has far more stability than renewables
- It's not necessarily an either-or situation, but when it comes to allocating public budgets, one can certainly come at the cost of the other.
  This is generally what people talk about when advocating focus on renewables over nuclear.
  I personally have no problem with privately funded and insured nuclear - if you're able to swing that, then all the power in the world to you. The issue at hand is that nuclear fundamentally fails here - it's too expensive to build and insure (not to mention the energy it produces being more expensive than its alternatives), hence public funding and insurance is essentially a prerequisite.
With PBR reactors, nobody is in danger if it breaks down, either. The pebble bed collapses, and fission stops.
Renewables cant produce an on-demand baseload supply without the addition of significant storage capacity.
- Baseload is by definition not on-demand, baseload is always there.
- This is true, and at the same time not really an issue any more at the rate that energy storage systems are progressing. Similarly to how solar and wind have absolutely plummeted in price, so is the case with energy storage systems s well. As of now, the LCOE of solar + storage is at half the price of nuclear (source) and trending cheaper. Nuclear is trending more expensive. Add on a construction time of 17 years for plants and any nuclear plant is basically economically dead on arrival.
- That's what I wrote in my 2nd sentence. That does not justify building more of them, because the baseline is already handled by the existing power plants.
Sigh. We can't meet energy demands if we only focus on the cheapest energy sources.
Like it or not, energy is priced based on how difficult it is to deliver to the recipient.
- And how does this justify paying a lot more tax payer money to build the NPP instead of renewables?
  France does not only focus on renewables BTW. They have NPPs that already handle the baseline. And building more of them is just not useful at all, when there is a better alternative...
Renewables are far cheaper and can be built faster and if they malfunction, no one is in danger.
No, that's not true. Solar workers fall off roofs and wind workers get hit on the head with falling turbines at about the same rate that people get cancer from nuclear, per joule generated.
- Come one... If it's really about minimizing death, just build photovoltaik on the ground. But that's not the priority of humanity anyways.
How many people have died because of nuclear catastrophies?
How many people have died because of renewables?
How many people have died because of fossil fuels?
Don't infight, we need to get rid of fossil fuel, not nuclear.
- You kind of missed the point of my post. I don't want to get rid of nuclear. I just don't want to build new NPPs, when there is a far cheaper alternative.
  BTW: How many people have died because of photovoltaic that is constructed on the ground on large fields? Probably 0... If you want to minimize death, this is the way to go.
France won't shut down fission for the simple reason that they need plutonium for their bombs.
- No, we already have it and do not plan increasing our nuclear arsenal.

its most powerful at 1,600 MW,

Fuck, that's 100 more MW than VVER-1500(project). Or 400 more than VVER-1200(working).

post-Chernobyl

???

is 12 years behind schedule

VVER-1500 is still project for 40 years. Most modern we have now is VVER-TOI (1300 MW).

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.

There is around a century's with of uranium with current mines.
But right now uranium is very cheap so most of it is "wasted". There is plenty of way of recycling used nuclear fuel or improving the productivity of uranium enrichment.
If uranium supply starts to actually be a problem there is a way to "create" more nuclear fuel: breeder reactor.
With breeder reactor France could fuel their reactor for millennia only with the depleted uranium they have in stock (when enriching uranium you end up with a tiny account of enriched uranium on one side and depleted uranium on the other, France is keeping the depleted uranium in stock specifically for this scenario)
source (french)
- Yeah or put another way: All that nuclear waste we occasionally talk about burying under a mountain has something like more than 90% of its energy left.
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.
- Uneducated take.
- Therein lies the problem.
You probably read about U-235, but yes. There are soviet BNs, their chinese clone, french experimental reactor and I think topic reactor, which can work on plutonium, which is side-product in regular reactors.

Good news!

Lets hope this one stays in better condition than their other nuclear plants lol

fuck yeah

They aren't burning coal like Germany? That's how you go "clean"...

By pouring endless amounts of money down the drain? Great strategy.
- It is if your intention is to not introduce carbon into the atmosphere over the 60 year life's lifespan to 90 year lifespan of the power plant
- Looks like there was an end to it.
  Going over budget and missing deadlines is normal for large infrastructure projects.
  If anything, seeing people's shock at this should reveal how little they know about development.
- And yet their electricity is still cheaper than Germany's ...

[Star Wars meme]

Princess(?): 12 years of extra safety and sustainability, right?

Young Darth(?):

Princess: Right?

Darth:

Aaaaand, the objective it to add 1000 new reactors in the next 25 years... we ded

Just start building a thousand today, and it's done in 17 years