> Averaging 10 years puts you at 2036 and is itself somewhat pessimistic.
The average time globally is 14 years. The latest point of reference in the west, Vogtle was announced in 2006 and came online in 2025, 19 years later. It took 7 years alone just to start building it.
There's no chance this would take less time in Italy, where you need to also find a suitable place, you don't have the know-how and there's an anti-nuclear referendum that's been voted 3 decades ago. So there is a lot that needs to be changed, starting from having a public voting.
Hinkley Point C, in UK, has ballooned it's cost from the planned 18B pounds to a 43B pounds in the span of a decade. These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Depends on what you consider the start date. Practically speaking there’s some investigation into building nuclear in Italy that already occurred but using that as a start date isn’t meaningful here. Similarly the announcement you point to was a long way from having everything required to actually build a power plant.
Until there’s actual funding talking about nuclear doesn’t really mean anything. Vogal was a boondoggle but it didn’t get construction approval until 2012 and like many projects ran into COVID delays on top of everything else.
> These projects always go overbudget, badly.
Using the worst examples means there’s something very wrong with each of them.
The 10 year estimate comes from a range of projects including some that go very badly and others that didn't.
You can always pick worse numbers by using a smaller sample of projects, but it isn’t necessarily meaningful to do so. California’s high speed rail has gone far worse than Italy’s projects, America is currently comically bad at large construction projects.
They go over budget because regulatory burdens are very high, not because of any fundamental unknowns in deploying the technology. A motivated national government could reduce the cost substantially.
Regulations of course have a purpose but they are often (a) out of date with respect to current technology (b) not well well designed to accomplish their intended purpose in the first place or ignored 2nd and 3rd order effects and (c) perverted to extract rents for incumbents at the expense of new market entrants. Certainly (a) is true in most places with respect to nuclear technology.
The average time globally is 14 years. The latest point of reference in the west, Vogtle was announced in 2006 and came online in 2025, 19 years later. It took 7 years alone just to start building it.
There's no chance this would take less time in Italy, where you need to also find a suitable place, you don't have the know-how and there's an anti-nuclear referendum that's been voted 3 decades ago. So there is a lot that needs to be changed, starting from having a public voting.
Hinkley Point C, in UK, has ballooned it's cost from the planned 18B pounds to a 43B pounds in the span of a decade. These projects always go overbudget, badly.