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129 points mpweiher | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.413s | source
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DarkNova6 ◴[] No.46247903[source]
So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired. Demanding high quality, no-fault tolerance production. Dependent on resources not found in Europe.

Look, I love nuclear technology. But time has moved on. The costs to rebuild this industry is astronomical and means we lose out on key-future technology like batteries.

Edit: But then there are bombs. And especially French love their nukes due national security. This is the only reason to keep pushing for nuclear, since Russia, the US and China are not gonna change direction on this either. But the very least we could do is be honest about it.

Edit 2: Changed from "World has moved on" to "time has moved on", since evidently China has invested for a good 2 decades to build their own fully functional nuclear-industry. Proving my point that it takes dedicated investment, network effects and scale to rebuild this industry. After all, they too want to mass produce nukes.

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sailingparrot ◴[] No.46248343[source]
> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired.

This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?

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DarkNova6 ◴[] No.46248414[source]
If you are so smug about this, answer me:

1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?

2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?

3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?

The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.

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1. nine_k ◴[] No.46248658[source]
France in particular connected a new nuclear power station to the grid as late as 2024 [1]. But the previous reactor was put online in 1999 or so.

Three more were built in EU since 2000: one in Finland (Swedish/Finnish design) and two in Slovakia (Soviet/Russian design).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

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2. laurencerowe ◴[] No.46249370[source]
The Finnish reactor is the same French EPR design used at Flamanville and Hinkley Point C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)