In France, the first nuclear plants of the current production group were contracted in 1970, and connected to the network in 1977, so that's 7 years for a pilot industrial project. Later plants were built in 5-6 years.
The kicker is that this work is highly scalable: France built over 6 reactors per year over its program.
The current issue with new generation reactors seem to be related to loss of industrial knowledge, there is no reason to think that the next built in the series would suffer from the same issues.
> Nuclear power plants take too long to plan, build and bring online. IIRC it's at least 11 years
It's crazy what people come to believe. To generalize the pathetic bureaucratic failures like the EPR to all model couldn't be farther from reality.
Russian commercialized VVER 1200 models take 57 month to build.
Their successor, the VVER-TOI take 40 month, so 3.5 year to build. It output 1300MWe
Besides the russian competitive advantage, China build plants in 6 years.
> average construction timeline for each reactor about seven years
China have 27 in construction right now, can someone knowledgeable explain why it still takes 7 years to build a single reactor?
I've always read that if we were building more reactors we would get economies of scale, and things would happen quickly.. but that doesn't seem to be the case.
> building a fission reactor takes one or two decades
This is not universally true. Looking at South Korea's construction times for example[1], you'll see that it's averaging between 5-7 years per reactor, all the way into the 2000s and 2010s. Japan shows similar numbers[2], and they're currently in the process of restarting their nuclear investments following the accident at Fukushima Daiichi. Same story for China[3].
85% of nuclear reactors are built in under 10 years[1].
It also seems to me that if there were sufficient political willpower that improvements could be made here. It’s a bit like how anti-solar folks complain about the massive cost while ignoring that it is possible to improve costs.
Half of the reactors the US ordered have ended up being cancelled due to the economics.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]
> Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.[53]
> They are scheduled to be online in 2018 and 2019.
Unfortunately as is universally the case with nuclear construction (see the debacle in the UK as well), both reactors recently announced significant delays of ~18 months and at least an additional billion in cost overruns. There may be an economical way to build nuclear but we clearly don't have it.
And to all the people who say "they take too long there isn't enough time": the best time to start nuclear power plant construction was 10 years ago, the second best time is now.
> [...] Building of the plant started 2005 and after the latest delays the reactor is supposed to go critical for the first time during January 2022. It was supposed to be ready during 2010.
So the one that started construction in 2013 doesn't exist?
20 years between plants isn't that big a deal. They're not building houses. Nuclear reactors take decades to built. It's one of the reasons they're so expensive.
Looks like one or two plants never finished.
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