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Comment by testing22321 | Hacker News Reader

China have 28 nukes under construction right now, and have built more in the last 30 years than the rest of the world combined.

Even with all that experience and expertise, their questionable environmental policies and questionable worker rights, it still takes them SEVEN years to build a single nuke.

The claim that anyone else can do it faster with zero recent experience isn’t only laughable, it’s downright fraud.

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it takes about 5y for latest units. And their env/worker policies are not that questionable in this regard. Heck, Japan did finish it's first ABWR FOAK in under 4y so China is in fact slow here. The question is rather why China bans inland expansion

China and Russia are about on par in build times now. Korea is next with APR, Barakah having about 8y/unit, W-house and EDF are the slowest for many reasons

The Chinese CAP1400s took 5 years and that's a new design to them. The first NPP was built in 1951 (ish) and took 18 months from blackboard to grid interconnection. Some designs take longer, others are shorter. Some parts of Vogal were rebuilt 3x times due to the federal government changing the design requirements multiple times during construction. Another challenge is that NPPs are built rarely enough that its hard to be a supplier to the nuclear industry so many parts are custom built per project. That doesn't have to be the case. The idea there is a hard limit of 7 years, sorry...that just isn't so.

> 5 years

Be careful with these figures. I understand they start the clock later than the west does.

Do they? Did japan start the clock later too with it's first ABWR?

We weren't talking about Japan.

We were talking about timelines. Chinese timelines are faster than western but slower than Japanese. So maybe you can expand your thought about how China is counting years differently

Wow, that's A lot. Even though there's diminishing returns with more workers, they'd probably build them faster if they weren't scaling out so much concurrently, right?

Seems like we could match a 7 year clip at a much smaller scale. We'll be forced to at some point, but we need to overhaul the regulatory mess and fix the grid first. Hopefully that happens long before battalions of Chinese drones and droids take over the world.

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