alt Hacker NewsThe same applies to nuclear power, though: when France built multiple copies of the same plant design, the first few builds were expensive but costs declined for subsequent models. It's fine to include projected costs reductions into your cost estimate, but you have to apply the same logic to competing systems.
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ViewTrick1002 • today at 6:53 AM
They didn’t. The French nuclear buildout famously experienced negative learning by doing.
Within a generation costs lowered, but between generations they exploded.
And the reductions were to small to make a dent in how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is in 2026.
These numbers already include a projected 30% drop in costs for EPR2 across building six reactors with the first coming online in 2038.
Building a series of nuclear reactors with overlapping schedules (about one completion every year or two) in one country should help. But it’s simply far easier to find cost reductions for wind turbines which are manufactured in the thousands per year or solar panels and batteries which are manufactured in the millions.