Vogtle ended up at roughly $13,000/kW. On shore wind globally is averaging roughly $1,300/kW. Grid-scale batteries are running roughly $3,000/kW, then add in for how much ride-through you expect to need.

Depending on local conditions, you can build out 10x as much wind capacity as you need, or various combinations of wind + solar+ batteries and still end up less expensive and with a faster deployment time than nuclear.

Lol, no. Électricité de France is being re-nationalized by the French government due to their terrible financials. Areva/Framatome needed cash injections to avoid creditor protection. Westinghouse did have to file for creditor protection and almost took down parent company Toshiba, but they were sold off at a loss to a private equity firm.

Nuclear only looks good on an operational basis. Once you add in construction and refurbishment/decommissioning costs, it looks far worse.

His figures are ridiculously optimistic for nuclear, $6000/kW and 6 year construction times.
Flamanville-3 and Olkiluoto-3 were both 12 years over their 5 year construction schedules. They were supposed to cost €3.3B and €3B respectively for 1650MW. Flamanville is expected to end up somewhere over €20B (€12000/kW), and Olkiluoto is somewhere around €11B, only due to 'not to exceed' limits in the supply contracts.

Hinkley Point C has gone from £16B to near enough £30B for 3200MW (£9400/kW)

It was the same with Vogtle 3 & 4. The preliminary budget of $12B, was changed initially to $14B at the start of construction. It's now somewhere around $30B and 7 years late. The two AP1000s have a combined output of 2200MW ($13000/kW).
V.C.Summer 2 & 3 was a similar pair of AP1000s. Costs went from $9B to $23B when the project was cancelled mid-construction.

Wind and solar are far faster to deploy, and typically on or near budget. The new, much cheaper redox flow batteries (100 MW/400 MWh for $266M Dalian, China) are capable of smoothing intermittency in areas without hydro, which can perform a similar function.

Edit. I should add that as of 2021, the global average for onshore wind is roughly $1300/kW. Prices continue to fall as new designs are introduced.

That's just not true. The Westinghouse AP1000 was given type approval in 2011. It's what is referred to as a GEN3+ reactor. A lot of R&D was put into simplifying the design, reducing the number of pipe runs, valves, pumps etc compared to GEN2 reactors. It also used large sub assemblies that were factory built off-site then moved for final assembly.

In theory they should have been cheaper to build, but they weren't. Large assemblies that don't fit together properly need a lot of very expensive site time for rework. There were other issues on top of that, which just compounded the assembly problems. It's how Vogtle ended up going from $12B to $30B+, and V.C Summer went from $9B to an estimated $23B when the project was cancelled while under construction.

The EPR units from Areva were similar GEN3+and received type approval in the early 2000s. They had similar cost overruns, for similar reasons.

I have strong reservations about SMRs. So far the cost/MW is about on par with traditional reactors while the amount of waste increases by 2 to 30x traditional reactors depending on technology used.

There are reasons why reactors moved from 300-600MW units to 1000MW+ in the first place. The increased output would cover what was thought to be marginal increase in costs. That turned out to be at least somewhat true.

Just like assuming a perfectly spherical cow, or a frictionless surface, you can completely ignore the economics, the massive cost and schedule overages to make nuclear work.

Flamanville-3 in France started construction in 2007, was supposed to be operational in 2012 with a project budget of €3.3B. Construction is still ongoing, the in-service date is now sometime in 2024, and the budget has ballooned to €20B.

Olkiluoto-3 is a similar EPR. Construction started in 2005, was supposed to be in-service in 2010, but finally came online late last year. Costs bloated from €3 to €11B.

Hinkley Point C project is two EPRs. Construction started in 2017, it's already running behind schedule, and the project costs have increased from £16B to somewhere approaching £30B. Start up has been pushed back to 2028 the last I've heard.

It's no different in the US, where the V.C. Summer (2 x AP1000) reactor project was cancelled while under construction after projections put the completed project at somewhere around $23B, up from an estimate of $9B.

A similar set of AP1000s was built at Vogtle in Georgia. Unit 3 only recently came online, with unit 4 expected at the end of the year. Costs went from an initial estimate of $12B to somewhere over $30B.

Note that design, site selection, regulatory approvals, and tendering aren't included in the above. Those add between 5-10 years to the above schedules.

My setback thermostat goes to 16C (61C) at 11:00pm. Winter is when I sleep the best.
In the summer, I just go to 21 with the AC.

Oh, I remember that ad campaign really well. Dad was a fan and used: "Where's the beef?" early and often.

For years I had a GE cut sheet for a turboencabulator from 1962 pinned to the wall in my office. It was pretty funny seeing people, some of them senior engineers, try to figure it out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator#/media/File:GE_Turboencabulator_pg_1.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator#/media/File:GE_Turboencabulator_pg_2.jpg

The only other book I struggled with was Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The travel-log sections were entertaining, and the relationship with his son was interesting, but the discussions on the nature of quality were completely lost on me.

I did get through Zen on the second attempt because I thought it was worth it. I saw no value in Atlas Shrugged at all.

Very early on in my career in consulting engineering, I had an architect tee-off on me for changing the ceiling heights of the office space she'd designed.

I'm electrical, all I was concerned with was circuiting her lights, that was it. I had documentation showing that I'd worked off of exactly the same ceiling heights she had sent me. Heights that she'd apparently changed somewhere along the line without informing the client, who was an international conglomerate, and notoriously picky to work for.

That could have blown over, had she not berated me over email while CCing the client, my management and just about anyone else involved with the project. I made sure to "reply all" showing where the change had happened. She was replaced on the project the following week.

After that I stuck to industrial projects, where the buildings were non-descript concrete and steel boxes with no architectural involvement.

I remember not picking up another book for some time after finishing Shogun. I wanted to hang onto it as long as I could. It's epic.

Dad had an interesting career. Started as an office clerk for a railway with only high school education. Then he got into using an IBM 650 (IIRC) for doing freight rate calculations. How he managed that transition, I have no idea. He didn't care for being cooped up all day flipping switches, dealing with punch cards and tapes.

He switched to marketing and got on there very well and retired after 37 years as a regional director.

He always has a book on the go, even now at 83. He has an eclectic pile of them that he kept, from Zane Grey to an early history of the Civil War written around 1870.