alt Hacker News> So you want to create a completely new industry. From the ground. With all existing experts having retired.
This is an article about Europe. Do you really believe France alone is operating 57 nuclear reactors, and producing 70% of its energy via fission, without the industry, the knowledge, and with no experts left? Is chatgpt running everything?
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I don't know how reliant France is, but they do seem to rely quite a bit on Rosatom (https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/03/12/french...).
They also rely on imports of uranium - e.g. from Niger, which recently had quite the fallout with France.
It does not look to me at even a casual glance that French nuclear tech could fully work on its own. Similar for the UK.
It is not just about the experts, the supply chain too. Although, of course how much that matters in comparison is the question, since pretty much everything nowadays depends on some faraway place.
If you had followed the crisis from 2022 when a quarter of the reactors were out of service, you wouldn't ask that question. They had to fly in welders from the US because they were not able to fix the problem... Also, every new nuclear project done by the French in this century has been a complete disaster. Flamanville, Olkiluoto and now Hinkley Point C.
If you are so smug about this, answer me:
1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?
2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?
3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?
The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that the industry has existed. It was world class, but the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist and would need to be rebuilt for the new generation of reactors. And we are not even talking Generation 4 here.