Advice across the board is that nuclear power plants take a really long time and cost a lot of money. They almost always go far over time and budget. And they’re expensive to operate. Why is that so?
In: Engineering
Two big reasons is safety regulations, which proponents of nuclear energy are likely to say are out of control and intended to prevent nuclear plants from being built at all. They’d argue that reactors would be perfectly safe without so many safety regulations impeding their construction. They have to assuage every fear people have about them whether or not those fears are rational. That costs a lot.
The other big reason is that we just don’t build them anymore. Because we don’t build them, there’s no economy of scale and there’s little infrastructure in place to build parts. Let’s say it costs $1 million to get a manufacturer set up to make a thingamajig for a nuclear plant plus $500K to actually build it. If you’re only building one plant, that thingamajig is gonna cost $1 million plus the $500K. Now lets say we decided that instead of building one plant, we’re gonna build 5. Now each thingamajig costs $200K plus $500K.
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