It was the failure of the French who build the damn thing (Areva NP, now Framatome). The French tried to make a rush job and cut corners but Finnish radiation safety organization don't allow it like French does.
They tried to cut corners in concrete casting, then they had to do it again. Then they tried to get away with bad welds and had to redo them, and inspection. Endless use of as cheap labor as possible.
Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville 3 in France and Hinkley Point C in the UK are all using the same reactor design: European Pressurised Reactor (EBR). This was jointly developed by France (Framatome and EDF) and Germany (Siemens).
All three projects are over-budget and have been dogged by delays.
I'm not against nuclear, but the cost of new (large) nuclear plants always spiral out of control. For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK is due for completion in 2026. Estimated total cost: £23 billion - making it one of the most expensive nuclear power plants in the world.
This BBC report on Hinkley Point C has some interesting facts:
> When Hinkley was approved in 2016, EDF estimated the cost at £18bn. Today, the company puts the bill at nearer £23bn.
The deal to build Hinkley Point C includes a fixed-price or ceiling cost for electricity known as the Strike Price:
> ...in 2016, the British government fixed that price at £92.50 per megawatt hour (MWh). The price rises with inflation and has now reached £106/MWh.
> Back then, the equivalent price for electricity from offshore windfarms was well over £120/MWh. But wind costs have fallen fast. Today new wind projects are fixed at about £50/MWh, well under half the price of Hinkley power.
> So, the big question for Hinkley watchers is this. By 2026, will the electricity it produces look very expensive?
When the wind isn't blowing it will probably look rather cheap, especially if gas shortages remain prevalent.
Regardless, I'm all for maintaining at least our current level of nuclear contribution to the grid until the renewable storage story is complete at GW scale. It's much harder to commission new nuclear plants if we allow all of ours to fall into disuse.
> When the wind isn't blowing it will probably look rather cheap...
But of course with a guaranteed and indexed linked strike price, it will be running at full pelt for its entire lifespan, regardless of how much cheaper solar and wind is available at any given time.
There are more complex reasons around managing the electrical grid which make this not such a bad thing. Reactive power and grid inertia control for example. Solar and some types of wind turbine (my understanding is that Doubly fed induction generators can) don't contribute to these factors at all.
To put the cost overrun into perspective - someone driving truck in 2016 was making £30k and in 2021 its £70k.
S&P Global Platts assessed UK day-ahead baseload prices at GBP540.15/MWh ($747.56/MWh) for delivery Sept. 14, up from GBP171.15/MWh Sept. 10. Sept. 9 as several plants priced themselves at GBP4,000/MWh amid low wind, outages and reduced interconnector availability*.
The UK energy situation is basically a total mess - they need more of everything (or to just stop shutting down everything). About the only thing being done is building more interconnects to import electricity from other countries.
For what it's worth I'm being billed £218/MWh plus a 28p/day standing charge in the UK and that's the standard rate capped by the government which will go up. You hear about power being generated for £50 or £30/MWh but don't see much of that as a consumer in the UK.
To me and I assume most Westerners it looks like an egregious excess while poverty is rampant. At least space projects produce trickle-down technology, but this is just busy-work.
It's literally a building, nothing justifies that cost... where are the death ray lasers? Where is the re-atomizer? Makes no sense, the figure must be wrong
Tammany Hall did corruption better than anybody. Robert Moses would blush.
It’s worth reading the line items from that construction. Carpenters getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars - multiple millions now - for a couple days of work. Enough carpeting ordered to cover whole parks several times.
Finland is also a country that just spent almost 20 years building one new nuclear reactor, and its still not in commercial operation