Those carriers have 700MW thermal output reactors. The new generation EPRs built now are about 6x that.
And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)
Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though
Iter is a research project that Europe is a part of, along with the rest of the world. That has nothing to do with building power plants, at least not anytime soon.
We haven't built a reactor in a long time. So those EPRs being built are all way behind schedule and thus costing substantially more.
You can design whatever you want. Building one is a whole different story. That's not an opinion that's just what happened at the first 2 EPRs and Hinckley point isn't going great either
Yup. Europe can absolutely still build reactors, just not at a price that is economically competitive.
Olkiluoto 3 started regular production in 2023, taking 18 years to build at a cost of €11 billion (3x over budget).
Flamanville 3 started regular production in 2024, taking 17 years to build at a cost of €13.2 billion (4x over budget) or €19.1 billion including financing in 2015 prices.
Hinkley Point C (two reactors) is currently estimated to have its first unit come online around 2030, taking 14 years with total costs now estimated at £31-35 billion / €36–41 billion (2x over budget) in 2015 prices.
It would really be great to understand (rather than me guessing) China's rationale to build these plants, and also their safety.
They generate about 5% of their electricity with nuclear. That's a lot, but is it enough to power the country if other alternatives stop being viable (war, shortages, ...?) Maybe it's OK for them that in such a situation, they just turn off enough residential power to last through the night with nuclear and storage. z
Do they see the nuclear research as dual use? My understanding is that nuclear subs and ships do use entirely different nuclear plants. Maybe research into small modular reactors is more dual use. There's also use for those reactors if they really want to build moon bases.
Maybe at their cost of the plans (I heard ≈3B for a 1+GW plant), this is actually competitive with solar+storage. It's definitely competitive with western nuclear power plants, if they want to export in other developing markets.
Rather than being dual use I think it’s more that countries want to keep their strategic industrial capacity around in terms of the nuclear engineering expertise in firms and universities that can potentially be redirected if needed.
The problem is that we insist on building nuclear plants like cathedrals, when we need to build them like Model T Fords.
Small modular reactors need to be rolling out of a factory ready to go, so we can do large redundant arrays of them, put them on trains to transport them around, etc.
A nuclear power station making a couple MW should cost maybe a few million tops once we have the ability to make hundreds of them a year from a factory instead of creating these 20 year projects for gigantic facilities that are all bespoke
It’s far from certain that SMRs will end up having lower costs than large nuclear reactors. Maybe they will work out but there is a huge amount of hype.
Funny, the Finns are super happy with their "uneconomic" nuclear reactors. Current approval rating for nuclear is now 81%, up from 77% last year.
The UK is so disappointed by their HPC project (which is the most expensive nuclear reactor project in history, AFAIK), that they just completed the investment decision for the follow-up Sizewell-C, which will also be 2 UK-EPRs.
Oh, the guarantee price for HPC is the same as that for various off-shore wind-projects. So obviously economically uncompetitive. At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion. Which does put the cost of £41 billion into perspective, despite that being the most ridiculously over-time and over budget nuclear project in history.
Actually, Flamanville 3 did not start "regular" production in 2024, they were just given go-ahead to go to full power a few days ago. It was first grid-connected in 2024 and then started a lengthy ramp-up phase. It slowly coming online was the time for the Cour des Comptes to give its verdict, which was pretty damning.
Flamanville 3 was probably the worst run nuclear project in French history. And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
EDF is often accused of receiving heavy state subsides, with the implication that this is to keep the nuclear power plants going or subsidize nuclear electricity. It is true that EDF gets state subsidies. For their intermittent renewable projects. Ba-da-dum-tss. The nuclear party of their business is tremendously profitable, despite being forced to subsidize industry through the ARENH program.
Existing nuclear reactors produce incredibly cheap power. The German decision to stop theirs before coal should be considered an environmental crime.
Finns should be super happy with Nuclear since the cost overruns were overwhelmingly born by Areva (majority owned by the French state) which accumulated losses of €5.5 billion and went bust!
As a nuclear weapons power the UK has a national security interest to keep its nuclear industry around. It needs to build some reactors to do that, but given the prices of new nuclear I don't expect it to build more than the minimum necessary.
Hinkley Point C comes in at £92.50/MWh in 2012 prices (£128.90 in 2024 prices). At the last auction wind prices were £54.23/MWh in 2012 prices (£75.68/MWh 2024 prices).
Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas but that is still much cheaper than nuclear.
> Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas
Yes, let's just handwave those concerns away, it's not like the grid needs power 100% of the time or anything. Two weeks without wind? No problem, just burn gas :) It's so cheap, independent of foreign supply, doesn't leak out of pipes and isn't a huge environmental hazard at all.
But then also be honest that nuclear can't solve that problem either. It's extremely slow to ramp up and down so it cannot keep the grid stable either.
So the only way to power your grid with all nuclear is to produce at the daily peak load + margin all day. Every day
This is completely false. Nuclear plants can and do ramp up quickly, thought not from/to 0, but that's generally not necessary.
And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.
> And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.
We already have grids operating without traditional baseload. This is a 2015 talking point.
See for example South Australia keeping either 40 MWe or 80 MWe fossil gas in standby (I would presume this is the lowest possible hot standby power level for said plants). They are aiming to phase this out in the near future as storage comes online.
Inertia is trivially solved in 2025. Either through grid forming inverters which today are available off-the-shelf or the old boring solution of synchronous condensers like the Baltic states used to have enough grid strength to decouple from the Russian grid.
This truly shows your ignorance. Please show curiosity rather than redditesque comments like this.
First. The final report of the Iberian blackout is not completed yet. It is taking longer than expected due to how complex the situation was.
They did release an interim factual report in which they specify the facts. The full root cause analysis and recommendations on how to prevent similar events is coming in Q1 2026.
From the factual report we learn that:
1. The cause was a lack of voltage control. Do you see inertia here?
2. They did expect traditional power plants to provide this, without verifying.
3. They did not expect renewable power plants to provide this, therefore they did not.
In about all other grids like, like for example the US, renewable plants are expected to provide voltage control. It is trivially done by extremely cheap off-the-shelf components.
But if the expectation does not exist then it will not be provided since the cost is non-zero.
My point was that, just like with renewables, a 100% nuclear grid doesn't work either.
They can adjust power but they're typically used as he load with some other source dealing with the peak load needed a short time a day. Typical peak capacity can be off in the middle of the night for example. Nuclear doesn't like that.
> At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion.
2 things, 10 pence is a lot. Not for retail but no power plant gets anywhere near that. It's mostly like 6 or 7.
Aside from that, the money you put in today is not spent on other things so there's an opportunity cost there too. That 40 billion at 2% interest is 60 after 20 years for example
> And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
What do you mean? Plenty of renewables are built without any government backing..
Have you looked when they started construction and what their projected end date was?
Yes there are new ones but both of those are perfect examples of the lack of knowledge [1].
I'll quote:
> Many of the organisations chosen to work on the different parts of the plant did not have any experience in nuclear, and little understanding of the safety requirements.
We'll get there. But yes, we're rebuilding a lot of lost knowledge and paying for the teething issues.
Those are not really great construction examples, are they? Both projects took 15+ years to complete with huge cost overruns. And for those two "successful" projects, you can find 2 or 3 that failed.
The Finnish reactor had one delay because the concrete used for the containment building wasn't of the 'nuclear grade'. That's why those regulations thankfully exist.
Building more will help though. This whole thread started about how we had lost important knowledge
It applies to most private residential and small-scale business electric use. Rationale would be getting quite political, as you might imagine. But I suppose there are several justifications that are given.
One is to offset the cost to the consumer for phasing out fossil fuels. Coal has been shut down and wind and storage and new nuclear is being built. Politically it has been presented as a matter of fairness; poor people are least able to pay for increases or to retrofit. A kind of wealth redistribution. (Though when you remember large corporately-run farms are included in the subsidy it's maybe not the most progressive form of redistribution.)
In Quebec where they have a great surplus of hydroelectric they also partly subsidize residential electricity with the profits of the surplus sale to the United States. The energy is so cheap there than resistive heating is cheaper than natural gas for home heating. Avoiding dependence on oil and gas imported from either the US or western Canada, or rather trying to lessen that dependence, is a standing issue for both Quebec and Ontario.
The argument against deregulation of energy prices is that poor people won't be able to afford it. But if you create a program that subsidizes some reasonable amount of energy per person per month the price of electricity can go as high as it needs to. I don't know if that was rationale in Canada but it's one possible rationale why government might want to aubsiduze energy usage.
> Boeing spent about $300,000 to help Ortberg move to Seattle. His decision comes more than two decades after Boeing leadership decided to move company headquarters out of Seattle. Ortberg received about $18 million for the months he was the CEO in 2024.
> In 2022, Calhoun received $22.5 million from Boeing. Most of his 2022 compensation was in the form of estimated value of stock and option awards. He received the same $1.4 million salary as in 2021. ... In February 2023, Boeing awarded Calhoun an incentive of about $5.29 million in restricted stock units to "induce him to stay throughout the company's recovery". In March 2023, Boeing announced Calhoun was being given shares worth $15 million that will vest in installments over three years.
Works for Tesla, the absolute poster child for this kind of behavior. They can lose double digit percentage of market share in key places and still give the CEO a trillion dollars.
The problem is that most of that work is not something anyone can pick up.
Regardless of the coding, one would first need to be familiar with git or VCS in general.
Also, you would want people to go back to normal jobs when they can. This would lead to short stints for all employees which I've always found to be one of the best predictors of bad outcomes
Obviously it wouldn't work for everyone but for those who have an interest in computers it would be a nice option.
I was unemployed for a while in 2008 and I'd have loved it if I could have got paid minimum wage for working on open source rather than just getting jobseekers allowance and searching for jobs that didn't exist.
Plus I'd have learned some valuable skills that would help me find work anyway. And it would have increased the numbers of IT savvy workers. Seems like a win-win-win.
> your bank account would just hold USDC or Bitcoin, and you could send a billion dollars to anyone in the world in a few seconds. That belief is powerful and I still ascribe to it.
These statements still surprise me to this day. If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.
I don't believe cross border was there in 2010 or so but why not implement that feature in an existing system instead of building out a parallel universe
The cross border not about technical capacity but legal control. For example if you are a refugee you might not be able to pull your bank savings and liquid stock with you from your home country to another without it being seized or taxed, but your crypto is always yours as long as you are the only holder of the keys. This scenario is one of the rare real world utilities I see with crypto.
Specifically for a refugee, at least with crypto you have the possibility to declare your assets in your destination, since you actually still hold on to them. Which is unlikely if it is tied to banks or investment platforms of an authoritarian country trying to genocide you. I understand this sounds like a fringe example but there are over 100 million forcibly displaced people globally.
A lot of countries cracked down on merchants accepting bitcoin, and in a lot of places it's illegal to offer BTC->cash conversions without KYC.
I suspect authoritarian regimes would be the first to close this loophole. This is not theoretical - Russia did this in 2022 to stop people from offloading their rubles and/or fleeing the country with their money.
Crypto is qualified as property and regulated in a very similar way. There is a market for borrowing using tokens regulated by digital assets act (цифровые финансовые активы).
> If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.
The promise was to make this available for everyone, to send money everywhere.
For example for me in Sweden it's really, really hard to send money directly to people in Ukraine since the Swedish banks simply refuse to send money there.
You are questioning the method when people just see the need.
If you're an engineer, no matter what you say about the method, you know a country at war will make you lose all your savings. Or if you're a foreign citizen in a country that will seize your assets, even "by accident".
It is not an engineering problem, it is a geopolitical and legacy banking problem. Yes sending an encrypted message somewhere in the world in under a second is solved.
It was a legit question. Your link is about EU regulation, not actual transfer mechanics.
Your bank does not have your money because it has lent it to someone else. If a bank has 5 business days to make a transfer then it can buy bonds, put money into an overnight deposit and do many other things. If a bank has 10 seconds then it has to maintain larger reserves which is a pile of money doing nothing.
A good bank would model cash flows to predict capital requirements and borrow from the CB as needed. Instant payments increase bank’s capital requirements and reduce margins. An EU bank cannot borrow from US Fed Reserve. Therefore EUR -> USD transfers are more problematic. The bank has to keep some USD buffer and/or be able to borrow in USD. Lenders will do fraud checks at various steps in the process, some steps can be manual. It does not happen at the time of the instant payment but rather triggered by it at a later time. Still, the end result is bank needs more capital.
As a user of fiat financial system you would observe:
1. Cross border instant payments are rare.
2. Large instant payments (>1M) do not exist.
3. Large payments may stuck at a middleman. Especially true at the time of political instability, even more so between unfriendly countries (e.g. China - India).
And yes, carriers have a lot less rules because it those have issues we're already in big trouble. You'll need strict rules given the big impact a failure has. No one has an aircraft carrier or sub in their backyard (not constantly that is)
Standardizing a design and building N of them would help though