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Comment by afterburner | Hacker News Reader

No, but they'll be hit by giant nuclear plant bids that are 3 times bigger than the expected cost (and this is from the people who would build the plant). Post from 2009: http://www.thestar.com/business/article/665644

The price per kilowatt of capacity ended up being three times more than other alternatives (natural gas in this case, not my favourite, but interesting to compare).

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That's a news story from Canada. Nuclear building costs vary widely from country to country, depending on the type of plant, the local infrastructure, and how psychotic the political and regulatory system is. In contrast, South Korea is steadily building nuclear plants for a fraction of the number quoted in that news story, and China is building them even cheaper. Without any sudden cost surprises, I might add.

Contrasting the two, I have to wonder: what's Canada's problem?

pretty easy, if you try to build safe - the costs are actually higher than most alternatives - comparing with china might not be very clever

China's cheapest nuclear plants are the CPR-1000, which are a refinement of an earlier French design imported from Areva. They're switching more of their efforts over to producing Westinghouse AP1000 plants. These are both designed with safety in mind.

Maybe Canada's the only one with a bidding process stringent enough to produce accurate bids? True nuclear costs tend to be buried in a variety of ways: not paying insurance (ignoring potential cleanup costs), hidden amongst the total energy budget, ignoring cost overruns, etc. I don't know that that's the case, but I put more stock in a process that shows an inkling of skepticism than one that seems to be pushed through enthousiastically by the government of the nation/region concerned. And especially not estimates from China, which has a notoriously terrible attitude towards safety in general.

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