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
1. They are incredibly complicated. It takes a LOT to build a nuclear power plant that functions. It takes even more to build one that is safe and won’t kill everyone in a three state area. It’s very very hard to anticipate every tiny little thing, and in something as complex as a nuclear power plant if something doesn’t line up how you expect, it can have huge knock-on effects
2. They are incredibly rare. The fact that they don’t build a lot of them means there’s no economy of scale. There’s no factory pumping out all the parts thousands of a time
3. In addition to number 2 above, they are all bespoke. They’re all almost completely different. Because they are built so rarely, or because the specific site has specific requirements, they are all a little, or sometimes a lot, different from each other. This means they have to be engineered and certified independently. Operators have to be trained on the specific site, and the training and certification doesn’t carry over
4. They take a long time to build. This means they are subject to inflation because even in a low-inflation environment, prices are still going up over the course of 5-10 years that a project takes
Many proposals to “reinvigorate” the nuclear industry tackle a lot of these problems: make them smaller so they’re not so complex, and you build more small reactors instead of fewer giant ones. You build the same one every time so they are identical and you get more benefits of a large scale manufacturing and construction operation
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