this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
1589 points (98.2% liked)
Technology
60131 readers
2901 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If loss of expertise were the cause, then there would have been a cost minimum in the late 80s when the maximum number of engineers had 5-15 years of experience.
Instead costs rose for each new reactor (including repeat builds of each model).
This theory has no explanatory power over reality and predicts the opposite of what happened.
Should the delays and subsequent costs overruns then be simply attributed to increased regulatory complexity or corporate greed?
I'm looking at the list of reactors in France, most of the builds during the last millennium were completed in more or less 10 years. Then there was a gap, and the new one is taking way longer than previous ones.
Same thing has happened in many other countries. Including finland, where at first we got 4 reactors in 6-10 years, and then after a gap of 25 years the next reactor was a clusterfuck that took almost 20years to build.
Both of these reactors are of the same design, and the issues are at least partially attributed to the company having forgot how to manage such large projects due to the years long gap in construction.
Part is the neoliberal economic model is really really bad at big projects. Part is the regulations and engineering complexity involved in not having them all shut down because they caught fire or the steam generators corroded (almost every program has "cheap" reactors at the beginning which have massive maintenance issues and leaks 10-30 years later, followed by expensive ones with massive delays). Part is corporate greed. Part is revealing and stopping rampant fraud and finding safety-compromising cost-cutting measures. Part is the lack of pressure from the military to make it happen as there is no longer a need for as much Plutonium. Part is that there actually are some semblance of environmental laws. Part is the fossil fuel industry interfering (as they do with all non-fossil-fuels).