Originally Posted by
AirScotia
France has commissioned at least six new nuclear reactors, and generates about 70% of its electricity from nuclear. Their reactors are the water-pressurised type, which take considerable time to build, but I believe the Small Module Reactors are both cheaper and quicker to construct. There isn't generally too much hostility to nuclear in Europe, apart from Merkel taking against it after Fukushima. I imagine it's not popular in the US because it has to be a federal project (socialism!) and there are no big profits to be made, if any.
Belief in small modular reactors being faster and cheaper is best treated like any other religious belief until such time as actual built facts become observable evidence. So far the ballooning costs and timelines of SMR projects are running in the same direction as large civil nuclear. The only people who have ever done nuclear well in the last 30-40 years are China and South Korea where they both work to standardised designs, large scale units, and well paced projects that allow for repeated learning and predictable industrial building cycles that allow for a full value chain. The whole SMR boondoggle is for other reasons.
Anybody that thinks that civil nuclear industry exists in a vacuum, isolated from military nuclear applications, is also struggling in the belief department.
(I have had some very limited personal insight into Iranian programmes in this area, all of which was done very cautiously, and I was never quite sure how many sets of mirrors I was looking through. But the ones I dealt with were lovely people to deal with despite all the difficulties. I wish the Iranian people well in obtaining a better future.)
I can also attest from personal experience that Iran has tried hard to develop in the wind industry sector. Again, it is very difficult for them to do this. Not only are sanctions an impediment, but also the natural tendency in Iran is to underprice gas to get the domestic gas consumption up. And any projects inevitably get forced to Chinese kit so they were never able to get an indigenous industry off of the first rung of the ladder. The whole world now has that last problem, both in wind and solar, and increasingly in storage.