How is China able to build nuclear power plants relatively quickly? Are you saying the British are incapable of doing this in less than a decade? I bet the military could do it faster.
the military couldn't by itself. they use suppliers nowadays for everything, but they might.
China? well, autocracies look great at these. look at the map, pick the ideal site, appoint a few folks to do it. for every year late shoot one of them.
estimated delay is strictly less than a year.
of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen, and of course later usually it turns out that the problem came up back then during the project, but it was too inconvenient.
....
the problem with the "Western" process is that they are absolutely 120% political (it's nukes after all, eh), but it's dressed up in 42 layers of idiotic formalities, procurement tenders, domain expert committees, laws, local/regional/state/national/supranational bureaucracy processes, impact assessments, esoteric cost-benefit scoring methodologies, etc. all of this is because the politics is really muddy. so it's a very suboptimal compromise after all.
and it shows. basically it's the classic case of "sure, you get one plant, but it makes no sense in itself, because the economics calls for a fleet of 20+ standardized units and reprocessing" but also "sure, we just got one, that's uneconomical as hel, but we need to keep our nuclear industry/knowhow/capability alive"
and then 20-40 years later the public opinion is completely poisoned by that, and now reversing course requires a fucking war.
> of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen
Chernobyl is an older design than plants we builds today. if I recall correctly Chinese plants include a lot of passive safety features especially in the wake of Fukushima (gen III / gen III+). Fukushima by the way, despite repeatedly ignoring warnings of the risks of not being prepared for realistic tsunamis and earthquakes it might experience, survived relatively well all things considered. If I recall correctly they used a mildly updated design than Chernobyl.
It’ll be interesting to start seeing gen IV reactors coming online since they have an identical safety profile to fusion. If anything goes wrong the reaction stops rather than the runaway reactions common to traditional reactor designs that are basically fission bombs hooked up to a steam engine.
> Fukushima by the way, despite repeatedly ignoring warnings of the risks of not being prepared for realistic tsunamis and earthquakes it might experience, survived relatively well all things considered.
Yes most nuclear incidents involved risks being ignored. But I don't see how this is an argument for nuclear. This will keep happening as long as we have this stuff built and operated by the lowest bidder bound to make as much profit as they can.
I figured someone works raise that argument because it’s an easy and obvious one but is not helpful.
A) coal power plants ignore warnings too. It’s just that it ends up as a distributed problem of cancer clusters and failing lungs m as by years later that’s harder to link
B) shipping oil creates a lot of ecological and human damage through oil spills
C) even with all the incidents, nuclear is still safer than carbon-based energy sources. It’s death/kWh is closer to wind.
D) gen IV reactors have no risk of runaway reactions negating your argument
So even with the issues they’re still safer and only get safer
Chernobyl was not the fault of rushing things. Chernobyl was the result of only having a single line of control with no separate regulatory system.
The plant (and those like it) had a flaw that when you slam on the brakes you momentarily turn *up* the fire in doing so. Normally this is harmless, but with Chernobyl the idiot in charge was so determined to proceed with his stupid safety demonstration that he didn't hit the SCRAM until the last second--and the momentary increase as the rods came in caused a major power excursion. Whether it went prompt critical or just came within a hair of it we probably will never know.
If someone were to try something like that in the US the phones at the NRC would have been ringing off the hook long before the reactor got in trouble.
Nuclear requires less red tape, engineering & construction workers, manufacturing scale among others. UK or west is worse in all these factors. Anti nuclear lobby causes lot of red tape which adds to the cost. Nuclear engineering is not cool or not even being taught in most univs in west and no workers with knowhow after nuclear industry shut down in 80s. To bring up people with knowhow and skills, it would take almost a decade of constant effort. Building first plant costs a lot, second a little less etc. India and China are building nuclear plants in fleet mode, which amortises costs and keep worker pool alive.
The constraints are probably different for civilian vs military power plants. Military nuclear reactors are known to use more highly enriched fuel than civilian ones. At one point the Soviet Union had a fleet of nuclear-powered ice breakers that used highly enriched fuel.
