Most of the nuclear power plants in the west were built a long time ago with very few new projects happening in the last 20 years. This means that every single power plant has to be planned and constructed from scratch which creates expenses in long planning and approval processes. Additionally, the small quantity of projects means that it’s also not feasible to mass produce the individual components for plants which further drives up costs.
This is in many ways the opposite trend of technologies like solar panels which have seen rapid cost declines specifically because the sheer scale of production has enabled lots of small savings through standardization processes that compound over time.
But this is surely a choice, right? Framatome’s designs are pretty standardized, because they decided to build a lot of them at once. If we decided to build twenty new plants instead of two, what is stopping us from using the same design for each of the twenty?
But this is surely a choice, right? Framatome’s designs are pretty standardized, because they decided to build a lot of them at once. If we decided to build twenty new plants instead of two, what is stopping us from using the same design for each of the twenty?