> Nuclear power can be fast to build. It would need to be constructed in volume, with immutable designs.
Exactly. You need look nowhere further than the french nuclear timeline for that to be clear: the country grew from 4.5GWe capacity to 49.5GWe between 1977 and 1987. 900MWe class reactors took 5~6 years to build, and the 1300MWe 7 to 8. And when you've worked out the kink, this can be parallelised massively (as long as you have sites to put them on), for about 20 years the country had a dozen reactors being built concurrently, the slowdown in construction times really started as the number of plants being built decreased: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Chrono-p....
The design got more complex and there were teething issues with the N4, but Chooz took 16 years to enter service where the P3s took 8 years at most.
In 2020, nuclear energy accounted for 70.6 percent of France's total energy production what is stunning, if you take into account its one of the G7 countries:
It gets 70% of its electricity from nuclear, but electricity is only a minority of the energy we use, so France still gets most of its energy from fossil fuels:
I had the privilege of watching a bunch of (6 or 7) French engineers make an impromptu visit to the ticket desk (of the airline I worked for) at Charles de Gaulle airport and work their magic, running comms and power with no fuss, just teamwork and that brilliant "why not now?" European attitude.
Meanwhile back at Heathrow that would have taken months of permits and planning and dealing with useless subcontractors.
Were, things have gotten way less great since the 80s, it’s mostly coasted.
Too bad really: nuclear power was a way to gain independence (from the US and the oil) but then it kinda fell by the wayside as the country largely went with oil anyway (though the grid is both powerful and rather clean owing to the high ratio of nukes).
Would have been interesting for the country to ride the contrarian gallic spirit and decide to go all in on electricity and renewable way back then.
Exactly. You need look nowhere further than the french nuclear timeline for that to be clear: the country grew from 4.5GWe capacity to 49.5GWe between 1977 and 1987. 900MWe class reactors took 5~6 years to build, and the 1300MWe 7 to 8. And when you've worked out the kink, this can be parallelised massively (as long as you have sites to put them on), for about 20 years the country had a dozen reactors being built concurrently, the slowdown in construction times really started as the number of plants being built decreased: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Chrono-p....
The design got more complex and there were teething issues with the N4, but Chooz took 16 years to enter service where the P3s took 8 years at most.