The two nukes that recently came on line in the US were so over budget and timeline that all customers now pay a “surcharge” on their bill to pay for it.
Western counties building nukes is so expensive it makes the cost of electricity go up.
The real stickler is that just from pure lucky timing, data centers will likely be the direct beneficiaries of the third reactor coming online at the Vogle plant here in Georgia. So taxpayers foot and will foot the bill, and meanwhile our governor and mayor are tripping over themselves giving tax breaks to data centers.
France is a western country with its own economic and labour troubles. The enormous expense of building nukes in the US is entirely its own making and much more complicated than just "western" inefficiency.
You might want to look up flammanville. They built a new reactor there and that also took 20 years or so and was way over budget.
We've built a lot of nuclear in the last century and then largely stopped. A lot of the know how is gone which is what we're paying for now.
Also, in France, all those reactors were largely the same leading to economies of scale when building them. Everything we build today is essentially a one of so you don't get to spread that cost over multiple.
Hyper administrative state-capitalist economies all have the same problem with infrastructure. The US has an image of being more capitalist and efficient, which is true to a degree, but once you get a large-scale project that hits all fed->state->municipal politics it's not much different than France. It's just minor variations of who the mandatory 'stakeholders' are ...who demands a cut and who delays/blocks progress.
As soon as some project is being pitched by politicians as "creating thousands of local jobs" it's either DOA or will be many years late and over budget.
State subsided construction and maintenance doesn’t pass straight through to consumer prices.
Also, France can’t build new nuclear for cheap/fast anymore either. They have a program for new reactors, even if they go ahead the first one won’t come online till 2038 by the earliest. We can’t wait that long.
does it matter much when in the end pricing is decided by merit-order system [1]? i.e. when you are dependent on other sources or neighbouring markets with very different composition.
not to say it is remains costlier than conventional sources, albeit not accounting for externalities.
The French are wholly unable to build new nuclear power.
Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 12 years late on a 5 year construction program.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles.
Currently they can’t even agree on how to fund the absolutely insanely bonkers subsidies.
Now targeting investment decision in H2 2026. And the French government just fell and was reformed because they are underwater in debt and have a spending problem which they can’t agree on how to fix.
A massive handout to the dead end nuclear industry sounds like the perfect solution!
https://particulier.edf.fr/content/dam/2-Actifs/Documents/Of...