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Robb Stewart's avatar

Great summary! I just finished my PhD on the construction cost for advanced nuclear projects. You accurately describe many of the problems these projects face in both Part I and Part II. From the megaproject scale and complexity to the high degree of regulatory oversight and indirect costs. However, I think you overstate the impact of regulation on the recent cost overruns. It is correct to say that the primary issues for Westinghouse at Voglte have been change orders, but they were mostly internally driven, not caused by changing regulation. Westinghouse had only completed a fraction of detailed design when they started construction, so there were hundreds of design changes from stud spacings to wall locations to penetrations to tank sizes. Each of these required license amendments, but the change was usually driven by a constructability challenge not a license amendment.

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Jesse's avatar

Fingers crossed the industry has learned a few things when going into the SMRs. Some designs approach of eliminating systems entirely seems the right way to keep costs under control. For example (following it as the first build will be near me by OPG) the BWRX-300 is eliminating the main core circulation pumps, which eliminates the backup and redundant backup pumps, and the drives and instrumentation associated with them, and pipes and valves and all the potential interferences those imply. Trading steel for whole systems seems to be a good approach.

Do that with a bunch of the other systems, and maybe we start to get to something manageable. We will have a workforce that has been doing a whole bunch of reactor refurbishments in the leadup to this as well so I take this project as one of the best chances for a reasonably under control FOAK new build.

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