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Comment by badcppdev | Hacker News Reader

Follow up question. Can you name a country that does have a good cultural mindset for nuclear safety?

Years ago I used to naively assume the Japanese were very safety conscious and then I read details post-Fukushima that made me realise that the corporate managerial mindset rules there as well.

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I've come to think that France might have a good culture in this respect. No major train crashes for years; there's never been a serious accident on the TGV. They have nuclear reactors all over the place and they seem to have managed to operate them safely. Airbus by all accounts seems to have a good safety culture.

Maybe it's because of the 'fraternité' in 'liberté égalité fraternité; they have very strong culture of public solidarity and very low income inequality compared to say Britain or the US.

And maybe that's why it doesn't cost a fortune to build high speed rail there as well; because there is a moral element to it that means you don't rip off your fellow countrymen.

France standardized all of their reactors. You could swap components in and out of any number of their nuclear reactors.

https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...

That's not how most other countries handled their nuclear power architecture and I think it's one of the main reasons why France has had major success with no issues. There's nothing flashy about how their nuclear reactors operate but they're very easy to staff and maintain long-term.

Noticably when encountering issues with welds last year they also shut down all reactors with shared components for inspection/maintenance.

While this has been a real problem and got them into some supply tight spots over winter it definitely speaks for their approach to safety.

It’s not all good news though - more than half of the fleet were offline at one point last year, to repair cracks that had developed. Arguably the standardized design led to all these reactors having the same problem at about the same time, where some diversity of design might have limited the “blast radius” of this flaw.

France has a gini coefficient of 32.4, UK 35.1. In comparison the US has one of 41.5, and Norway 27.7. There's not a huge difference in income inequality between France and the UK.

Don't be silly, everyone on HN knows that Europe has no industry! /sarcasm

(more seriously, the French nuclear industry has avoided major disasters but at the cost of some expensive repairs as the fleet is aging together. At least they didn't skimp on the repairs.)

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