That’s the engineering knowledge lost over the last 30 years costed out.
Making 2 reactors since 95 has some side effects, a lot of the senior engineers since then have retired, standards have changed, and new engineers need to learn.
Exactly what I was thinking
It like those highspeed rail projects that are finally getting going in the US, they’re over budget because a lot of people now have to be trained on how to work on such a project due to either lost knowledge or new stuff they’re learning during the process
Another factor in the trains, at least for California, is that the project was put on hold for a while because of the hyper loop crap. Now they need to resume buying land for the track and prices are where they are
Honestly they should just specify the project as a public works project, would give them eminent domain rights and skip the whole 9 yards of land pricing. It would force it to be done based off fair market price instead of the inflated BS all land is currently at. Least if I understand eminent domain right.
Nah they are over budget because there is no incentive to keep under budget, it was sub contracted out so much that there is either no communication/miscommunication/or willfully not listening, sales pretended they were engineers, and bad engineers were promoted to project management.
I work in infrastructure.
Me three weeks ago on email to main contractor: hello, your spec is calling for some parts that are no longer manufactured which means we will have to buy used. Leading to more money now and higher replacement part costs in the future for the government. Plus these parts are on the border of safe.
This morning: your exception list was rejected, follow spec.
So a small city in California is getting a brand new system made of used parts. No this isn’t a direct quote this is a summary.
can the maintenance department who will be eventually responsible start working on fabricating those so you’ll have new-made even if not off the shelf? rapid prototyping and small runs…
The paying to train is one thing. The bigger problem is people who aren’t super experienced in these projects doing estimates and costings.
You’re always going to have some overruns, and if you’re lucky, some underruns too. But if your estimates are out of wack… well. Good luck. Combine that with Parkinson’s law and you are in for a world of hurt.
Yep. The failed dual reactor project in SC that also used the AP1000s was a gigantic clusterfuck. Most of the major contractors had essentially no experience on projects of the scale and it resulted in massive cost overruns, delays, and a compounding web of fraud and lies to shareholders and regulators that wound up in utility executives in prison and the eventual sale of the entire utility SCANA to Dominion Energy.
Haha, this is insightful, but I worry an incorrect conclusion re: cost and overruns. Yes, lots of extremely experienced engineers have retired; but, the pace even in the 70s, 80s and 90s was oft beset by slowdowns and overruns. See: 9 mile, river bend, rancho seco, comanche peak, and those are just the ones I know off the top of my head.
We need more, but it’s a nuclear-and-renewables, not nuclear instead of renewables. I hope smr and other designs get a better shake this time, because climate change doesn’t bode well for coastal installations, and frankly, building many more large PWRs isn’t going to happen quickly.
Frankly I hope we can turn the experience debt to our advantage - rigorous investigation of all the many options disregarding the established dogma of large PWRs would be good in my view. YMMV.
