Lol, no. Électricité de France is being re-nationalized by the French government due to their terrible financials. Areva/Framatome needed cash injections to avoid creditor protection. Westinghouse did have to file for creditor protection and almost took down parent company Toshiba, but they were sold off at a loss to a private equity firm.
Nuclear only looks good on an operational basis. Once you add in construction and refurbishment/decommissioning costs, it looks far worse.
His figures are ridiculously optimistic for nuclear, $6000/kW and 6 year construction times.
Flamanville-3 and Olkiluoto-3 were both 12 years over their 5 year construction schedules. They were supposed to cost €3.3B and €3B respectively for 1650MW. Flamanville is expected to end up somewhere over €20B (€12000/kW), and Olkiluoto is somewhere around €11B, only due to ‘not to exceed’ limits in the supply contracts.
Hinkley Point C has gone from £16B to near enough £30B for 3200MW (£9400/kW)
It was the same with Vogtle 3 & 4. The preliminary budget of $12B, was changed initially to $14B at the start of construction. It’s now somewhere around $30B and 7 years late. The two AP1000s have a combined output of 2200MW ($13000/kW).
V.C.Summer 2 & 3 was a similar pair of AP1000s. Costs went from $9B to $23B when the project was cancelled mid-construction.
Wind and solar are far faster to deploy, and typically on or near budget. The new, much cheaper redox flow batteries (100 MW/400 MWh for $266M Dalian, China) are capable of smoothing intermittency in areas without hydro, which can perform a similar function.
Edit. I should add that as of 2021, the global average for onshore wind is roughly $1300/kW. Prices continue to fall as new designs are introduced.
That’s just not true. The Westinghouse AP1000 was given type approval in 2011. It’s what is referred to as a GEN3+ reactor. A lot of R&D was put into simplifying the design, reducing the number of pipe runs, valves, pumps etc compared to GEN2 reactors. It also used large sub assemblies that were factory built off-site then moved for final assembly.
In theory they should have been cheaper to build, but they weren’t. Large assemblies that don’t fit together properly need a lot of very expensive site time for rework. There were other issues on top of that, which just compounded the assembly problems. It’s how Vogtle ended up going from $12B to $30B+, and V.C Summer went from $9B to an estimated $23B when the project was cancelled while under construction.
The EPR units from Areva were similar GEN3+and received type approval in the early 2000s. They had similar cost overruns, for similar reasons.
I have strong reservations about SMRs. So far the cost/MW is about on par with traditional reactors while the amount of waste increases by 2 to 30x traditional reactors depending on technology used.
There are reasons why reactors moved from 300-600MW units to 1000MW+ in the first place. The increased output would cover what was thought to be marginal increase in costs. That turned out to be at least somewhat true.
KTM did a thing on some models where electronic features, like cruise control, would all be unlocked for the first 1500kms as a trial mode. After that they’d stop working. If you wanted to keep them, you’d pay and the dealer would unlock them.
I don’t necessarily have an issue with that, as it’s a one time fee, and you only pay for those features that you want. I think people do get upset when they’ve had something and it’s taken away.
Any sort of subscription is an absolute dealbreaker though.
Edit. LOL at the downvotes. Reddit will never die.
Previously KTM had those features behind a paywall. If you wanted them, you’d go to the dealership and they’d unlock them. At least this way you had 1500kms to figure out if they were useful or not. The other option was to just include everything and bump the price up accordingly. KTM were going to get paid for their development work, one way or the other.
Vogtle ended up at roughly $13,000/kW. On shore wind globally is averaging roughly $1,300/kW. Grid-scale batteries are running roughly $3,000/kW, then add in for how much ride-through you expect to need.
Depending on local conditions, you can build out 10x as much wind capacity as you need, or various combinations of wind + solar+ batteries and still end up less expensive and with a faster deployment time than nuclear.