Iter is a research project that Europe is a part of, along with the rest of the world. That has nothing to do with building power plants, at least not anytime soon.
We haven't built a reactor in a long time. So those EPRs being built are all way behind schedule and thus costing substantially more.
You can design whatever you want. Building one is a whole different story. That's not an opinion that's just what happened at the first 2 EPRs and Hinckley point isn't going great either
Yup. Europe can absolutely still build reactors, just not at a price that is economically competitive.
Olkiluoto 3 started regular production in 2023, taking 18 years to build at a cost of €11 billion (3x over budget).
Flamanville 3 started regular production in 2024, taking 17 years to build at a cost of €13.2 billion (4x over budget) or €19.1 billion including financing in 2015 prices.
Hinkley Point C (two reactors) is currently estimated to have its first unit come online around 2030, taking 14 years with total costs now estimated at £31-35 billion / €36–41 billion (2x over budget) in 2015 prices.
It would really be great to understand (rather than me guessing) China's rationale to build these plants, and also their safety.
They generate about 5% of their electricity with nuclear. That's a lot, but is it enough to power the country if other alternatives stop being viable (war, shortages, ...?) Maybe it's OK for them that in such a situation, they just turn off enough residential power to last through the night with nuclear and storage. z
Do they see the nuclear research as dual use? My understanding is that nuclear subs and ships do use entirely different nuclear plants. Maybe research into small modular reactors is more dual use. There's also use for those reactors if they really want to build moon bases.
Maybe at their cost of the plans (I heard ≈3B for a 1+GW plant), this is actually competitive with solar+storage. It's definitely competitive with western nuclear power plants, if they want to export in other developing markets.
Rather than being dual use I think it’s more that countries want to keep their strategic industrial capacity around in terms of the nuclear engineering expertise in firms and universities that can potentially be redirected if needed.
The problem is that we insist on building nuclear plants like cathedrals, when we need to build them like Model T Fords.
Small modular reactors need to be rolling out of a factory ready to go, so we can do large redundant arrays of them, put them on trains to transport them around, etc.
A nuclear power station making a couple MW should cost maybe a few million tops once we have the ability to make hundreds of them a year from a factory instead of creating these 20 year projects for gigantic facilities that are all bespoke
It’s far from certain that SMRs will end up having lower costs than large nuclear reactors. Maybe they will work out but there is a huge amount of hype.
Funny, the Finns are super happy with their "uneconomic" nuclear reactors. Current approval rating for nuclear is now 81%, up from 77% last year.
The UK is so disappointed by their HPC project (which is the most expensive nuclear reactor project in history, AFAIK), that they just completed the investment decision for the follow-up Sizewell-C, which will also be 2 UK-EPRs.
Oh, the guarantee price for HPC is the same as that for various off-shore wind-projects. So obviously economically uncompetitive. At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion. Which does put the cost of £41 billion into perspective, despite that being the most ridiculously over-time and over budget nuclear project in history.
Actually, Flamanville 3 did not start "regular" production in 2024, they were just given go-ahead to go to full power a few days ago. It was first grid-connected in 2024 and then started a lengthy ramp-up phase. It slowly coming online was the time for the Cour des Comptes to give its verdict, which was pretty damning.
Flamanville 3 was probably the worst run nuclear project in French history. And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
EDF is often accused of receiving heavy state subsides, with the implication that this is to keep the nuclear power plants going or subsidize nuclear electricity. It is true that EDF gets state subsidies. For their intermittent renewable projects. Ba-da-dum-tss. The nuclear party of their business is tremendously profitable, despite being forced to subsidize industry through the ARENH program.
Existing nuclear reactors produce incredibly cheap power. The German decision to stop theirs before coal should be considered an environmental crime.
Finns should be super happy with Nuclear since the cost overruns were overwhelmingly born by Areva (majority owned by the French state) which accumulated losses of €5.5 billion and went bust!
As a nuclear weapons power the UK has a national security interest to keep its nuclear industry around. It needs to build some reactors to do that, but given the prices of new nuclear I don't expect it to build more than the minimum necessary.
Hinkley Point C comes in at £92.50/MWh in 2012 prices (£128.90 in 2024 prices). At the last auction wind prices were £54.23/MWh in 2012 prices (£75.68/MWh 2024 prices).
Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas but that is still much cheaper than nuclear.
> Now those prices for intermittent wind exclude the cost of providing backup power with gas
Yes, let's just handwave those concerns away, it's not like the grid needs power 100% of the time or anything. Two weeks without wind? No problem, just burn gas :) It's so cheap, independent of foreign supply, doesn't leak out of pipes and isn't a huge environmental hazard at all.
But then also be honest that nuclear can't solve that problem either. It's extremely slow to ramp up and down so it cannot keep the grid stable either.
So the only way to power your grid with all nuclear is to produce at the daily peak load + margin all day. Every day
This is completely false. Nuclear plants can and do ramp up quickly, thought not from/to 0, but that's generally not necessary.
And they provide grid stability by having rotating masses on the grid, and thus combine pretty nicely with small to medium amounts of intermittent renewals that can provide some of the peak power.
> At 10 pence/kWh the two reactors at HPC will produce electricity worth £200 billion.
2 things, 10 pence is a lot. Not for retail but no power plant gets anywhere near that. It's mostly like 6 or 7.
Aside from that, the money you put in today is not spent on other things so there's an opportunity cost there too. That 40 billion at 2% interest is 60 after 20 years for example
> And even so, this "damning" verdict was that it FV3 would only be somewhat and in the worst case marginally profitable. But still profitable. Which is better than pretty much every intermittent renewables project out there, certainly in Europe.
What do you mean? Plenty of renewables are built without any government backing..
Have you looked when they started construction and what their projected end date was?
Yes there are new ones but both of those are perfect examples of the lack of knowledge [1].
I'll quote:
> Many of the organisations chosen to work on the different parts of the plant did not have any experience in nuclear, and little understanding of the safety requirements.
We'll get there. But yes, we're rebuilding a lot of lost knowledge and paying for the teething issues.
Those are not really great construction examples, are they? Both projects took 15+ years to complete with huge cost overruns. And for those two "successful" projects, you can find 2 or 3 that failed.
The Finnish reactor had one delay because the concrete used for the containment building wasn't of the 'nuclear grade'. That's why those regulations thankfully exist.
Building more will help though. This whole thread started about how we had lost important knowledge
seems like a weakness for these generators, if you can prompt them into producing copyright violations then that seems to be pretty risky for the folks running them.
Are there any specifics about how this was trained? Especially when 5.1 is only a month old. I'm a little skeptical of benchmarks these days and wish they put this up on llmarena
edit: noticed 5.2 is ranked in the webdev arena (#2 tied with gemini-3.0-pro), but not yet in text arena (last update 22hrs ago)
I’m extremely skeptical because of all those articles claiming OpenAI was freaking out about Gemini - now it turns out they just casually had a better model ready to go? I don’t buy it.
Yeah I've noticed with Claude, around the time of the Opus 4.5 release, at least for a few days, Sonnet 4.5 was just dumb, but it seems temporary. I feel that redirected resources to Opus.
how do you know this is a better model? I wouldn't take any of the numbers at face value especially when all they have done is more/better post-training and thus the base pre-trained model capabilities is still the same. The model may just elicit some of the benchmark capabilities better. You really need to spend time using the model to come to any reliable conclusions.
Gotta auto grade every HN comment for how good it is at predicting stock market movement then check what the "most frequently correct" user is saying about the next 6 months.
> The conclusion was that superforecasters' ability to filter out "noise" played a more significant role in improving accuracy than bias reduction or the efficient extraction of information.
>In February 2023, Superforecasters made better forecasts than readers of the Financial Times on eight out of nine questions that were resolved at the end of the year.[19] In July 2024, the Financial Times reported that Superforecasters "have consistently outperformed financial markets in predicting the Fed's next move"
>In particular, a 2015 study found that key predictors of forecasting accuracy were "cognitive ability [IQ], political knowledge, and open-mindedness".[23] Superforecasters "were better at inductive reasoning, pattern detection, cognitive flexibility, and open-mindedness".
I'm really not sure what you want me to take from this article? Do you contend that everyone has the same competency at forecasting stock movements?
> I'm really not sure what you want me to take from this article?
I linked to the Wikipedia page as a way of pointing to the book Superforecasters by Tetlock and Gardner. If forecasting interests you, I recommend using it as a jumping off point.
> Do you contend that everyone has the same competency at forecasting stock movements?
No, and I'm not sure why you are asking me this. Superforecasters does not make that claim.
> I'm really not sure what you want me to take from this article?
If you read the book and process and internalize its lessons properly, I predict you will view what you wrote above in a different different light:
> Gotta auto grade every HN comment for how good it is at predicting stock market movement then check what the "most frequently correct" user is saying about the next 6 months.
Namely, you would have many reasons to doubt such a project from the outset and would pursue other more fruitful directions.
>In his 2019 memoir, The Threat, former Deputy Director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, quotes Trump as saying of Venezuela "That’s the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_United_States_invasio...
Modern smartphones are very private, featuring full disk encryption, sandboxed app data storage, and mandatory lock screens. Why do you think the data stored on your phone isn't private?
People hit like and then comment "ai"... I think they love being mad at ai or aren't mad enough to stop hitting like. (Just today I saw a viral video on IG of a monkey on the side of a mountain path jumping onto a man's umbrella and getting taken away by the wind)
Wow. What a post mortem.
Rather than Monday morning quarterbacking how many ways this could have been prevented, I'd love to hear people sound-off on things that unexpectedly broke. I, for one, did not realize logging in to porkbun to edit DNS settings would become impossible with a cloudflare meltdown
That's unfortunate. I'll need to investigate whether Porkbun plans on decoupling its auth from being reliant on CloudFlare, otherwise I will need to migrate a few domains off of that registrar.
It's also worth pointing out that comparing a fine-tune to a base model is not apples-to-apples. For example, I have to imagine that the codex finetune of 5.1 is measurably worse at non-coding tasks than the 5.1 base model.
This chart (comparing base models to base models) probably gives a better idea of the total strength of each model.
Europe has never stopped working on creating new and better nuclear reactor designs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
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