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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Smart man. I can't believe I'm saying this about _Macron_. We _have to_ figure out a way to build reactors cheaply and safely, and you can't do that without the political will, unfortunately. If you could, electricity would be "too cheap to meter" by now already.

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The political will didn't fail. The EPR reactor in Flamanville is a work-in-progress since 2007. Albeit it was scheduled to start in 2012 it isn't yet. It will cost at least 19.1 billions euros (initial budget: 3.4 billions euros). No governments pulled the plug on this disaster. How exactly isn't it "political will"?

Political will would be to commit to building _many_ reactors in the future, cheaply and safely. Cost overruns are a thing because this is still exotic, bespoke engineering, and it doesn't have to be. In fact, if nuclear is to succeed, it _can't_ be.

The EPR is a new generation (new reactor design).

As usual ramping it up implies to build one (the 'tête de série') or at max a few ones, then to launch series. We always did it this way.

Since 2005 4 projects were launched (France: Flamanville, Finland: Olkiluoto, China: Taishan, UK: Hinkley Point). The two first ones are ongoing disasters. Taishan was late and overbudget. Hinkley Point announced, 2 years into its launch, that it will be overschedule and overbudget.

In such a context launching now a huge amount of projects isn't realistic. When a project is late due to a lack of skills and project-management abilities (there is a report about this, the "rapport Folz"), launching 6 new projects may not be a terrific idea.

It'll be realistic once China starts building a new reactor every month, which is something they plan to do.

As far as I know China didn't announce anything. Where is the official announcement?

The source is a Bloomberg article ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli... ) which states that the boss of Chine General Power corp. announced his plans 200GW for 2035, nothing more. Admitting that it is an official governmental announcement (it doesn't seem so(?)) and given that China already has 50GW, that's maybe 100GW new (way less than 150 standard reactors).

Compare with renewables: 790GW already running (26% of the gridpower), and 1200GW planned for 2030. In 2020 China added 71,6GW windturbine power. Even considering the load factors the picture is pretty clear.

Complements: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/The-World-Nuclear-Industr...

(Thanks to Y. Marignac for part of the data)

Is the _underscores_ around words supposed to signify something? Or am I just using the wrong browser to view HN and it's not rendering or something. Sorry if this is an obtuse question I'm new here.

Probably habit on the part of the OP from other markup languages, to show emphasis. HN uses asterisks * for italics/emphasis: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

It's a Reddit thing, it makes the text bold on there but people seem to use it on here by accident.

It's older than that, gmail (also maybe MSN messenger?) used to have underscores italicize text, and asterisks would bold text.

Slack and WhatsApp do it, too. I bet also in most of the other major messengers around right now (Signal, Matrix, Telegram). It's a thing in MarkDown, as well. Now that I think about it, some of the only places I type prose where that's not what surrounding underscores do, are HN and various Apple programs (mail, notes, et c.)

[EDIT] For that matter, we all did the same stuff in ascii for years. Asterisks for emphasis (bold, now, in many places), underscores for underlining (which, in the case of, say, book titles, is better represented as italics if you can print italics instead, so I'd guess that's where the "underscore = italic" thing comes from)

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