Vogtle and Hinckley aren't cherry picking expensive plants, it's cherry picking middle of the road.
VC Summer is expensive, many billions spent and nothing to come of it ever.
Where do your cost numbers from Taishan come from? How do you come to costs that are believable from massive Chinese construction, or at least a cost that might be transferable at all to the rest of the world?
The history of nuclear is very clear: keep on increasing costs throughout construction, just enough that, taking into account the sunk cost fallacy, it makes sense to soldier on. VC Summer overshot that, and had massive corruption in the auditing of all parts of the project. Somehow Vogtle continues.
We literally do not know how to build nuclear in a cost effective manner any more. We can't structure contracts in the right way, we can't perform engineering to a high enough degree to make constructive plans. At Vogtle they literally poured the wrong concrete, and had to go back and get the design recertified with the NRC, because the original design was impossible to build, and on site they just plowed ahead with what they thought they could build. This is the level of incompetence, ball dropping, and bad contract structure.
Perhaps this sort of thing is fixable, but not on any reasonable timeline. The management is rotten from the top, so there's nobody that we can even order a nuclear reactor from.
Suppose you had $7.5B and wanted 3GW of nuclear at one of the many sites in the US that would welcome nuclear and its jobs. Who do you even bring that money to in order to build it? Rosatom? Are they going to meet NRC standards?
VC Summer is expensive, many billions spent and nothing to come of it ever.
Where do your cost numbers from Taishan come from? How do you come to costs that are believable from massive Chinese construction, or at least a cost that might be transferable at all to the rest of the world?
The history of nuclear is very clear: keep on increasing costs throughout construction, just enough that, taking into account the sunk cost fallacy, it makes sense to soldier on. VC Summer overshot that, and had massive corruption in the auditing of all parts of the project. Somehow Vogtle continues.
We literally do not know how to build nuclear in a cost effective manner any more. We can't structure contracts in the right way, we can't perform engineering to a high enough degree to make constructive plans. At Vogtle they literally poured the wrong concrete, and had to go back and get the design recertified with the NRC, because the original design was impossible to build, and on site they just plowed ahead with what they thought they could build. This is the level of incompetence, ball dropping, and bad contract structure.
Perhaps this sort of thing is fixable, but not on any reasonable timeline. The management is rotten from the top, so there's nobody that we can even order a nuclear reactor from.
Suppose you had $7.5B and wanted 3GW of nuclear at one of the many sites in the US that would welcome nuclear and its jobs. Who do you even bring that money to in order to build it? Rosatom? Are they going to meet NRC standards?