Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Monty Mole's avatar

I know someone who was a nuc engineer on the south carolina project that went bust... One obvious issue that you somewhat touch on is the lack of scale that nuclear power production in the US currently has. For many on the SC project, it was their first experience in construction of a new nuclear powerplant, as the expansion was the first nuclear reactor in the US to start construction in decades. Without volume in nuclear construction projects, there is nowhere to amortize the human capital development costs nor the physical capital costs required for learning such high complexity development . This impacts all levels of the nuclear power plant supply chain, not just the final stage. You cite that 1/3 of costs are services, but my guess is that those are simply the services at the final level. If one were to dig into the other 2/3, what portion of those costs would consist of engineering services and non-fully scaled processes? My guess is that these costs are still very far from the asymptotic minimum of raw materials costs that one can pursue with scale. You can't really change market labor costs but you can change labor productivity and waste. The chinese are of course right in that forcing scale enables buildup of reusable human capital, and repeatable processes, that make marginal construction costs much lower, if done properly. Time for NukeX?

Expand full comment
peter john's avatar

Mass production can lower the per unit cost. Put together a package to build a hundred or so reactors and have the federal government finance it at cost. Standardize everything.

Expand full comment
28 more comments...

No posts