Comment by mpweiher

Actually France knows how to build them cheaper and quicker.

Their whole nuclear industry (reactors and all) cost just €228 billion. And they built 50+ reactors in just 15 years.

They know how this works, and so do we: standardize a design, build lots of them, in overlapping lots so experience accumulates and knowledge gained from earlier builds can be passed on and applied to newer builds. This also worked for Germany with the Konvois, even though only 3 got built and the same technique is now working for the Chinese, who copied it from us.

With Flamanville 3, the French did none of these things. Why not?

They weren't allowed to do so. Politically. France actually was on a long-term nuclear exit trajectory. The Mitterand government put a law in place that not just demanded reduction of the nuclear share to 50% of total electricity production, it also capped the total permitted capacity to what was installed at the time: exactly 63.2 GW.

https://www.powermag.com/france-to-slash-reliance-on-nuclear...

So they could not build any additional nuclear power plants, meaning they could only build new plants (to retain the know-how of how to build them) if they turned equivalent existing capacity off.

Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.

But in order to retain their industrial capacity, they did just that idiotic thing, knowing that it would be idiotic. The 2 reactors at Fessenheim were turned off to allow exactly 1 new EPR to be built at Flamanville.

Not a standardized design, a brand new design. And a design that was also troubled, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KbQEMFRkM&t=7s

And not a lot of them, just a single one. And with a single one, obviously also no overlaps.

So that went about as well as one might expect: not at all.

Now the law has been removed, they have 14 EPR2 reactors of a new simplified design planned, with a first batch of 6 in lots of 2 each at 3 sites coming up.