alt Hacker NewsThis is not very surprising given that nuclear technology was choked for the past 30 years, until recently.
That does not negate the celebration of solar generation growth, but we should consider that nuclear did not have as much enthusiasm and investment as solar did in the recent decades.
Each nuclear plant is practically a new adventure, and recursively so. It’s specialized work and the people who learn to build one properly don’t travel the world consulting on them, except perhaps at the management and design levels. Welders aren’t.
Meanwhile once you’ve installed 10% of a solar project, the rest of the project is almost exactly the same, and you can ramp up or ramp down the size of the final build as you go and capital either becomes constrained or part of the build goes online and starts subsidizing the rest. Your experts have journeymen under them that can start taking on more work allowing the throughput to increase.
How Big Projects Get Done talks about how roads, solar and wind all have this property, and most special projects don’t, which leads to either massive cost overruns or dead projects.