  > If you are so smug about this, answer me:

Please adhere to the HN guidelines and refrain from this kind of language. We can discuss this more civilly.

But I'll answer what I can, assuming your are genuine.

  > 1: How man reactors were built in the 1970s and are nearing end-of-life?

10 reactors, 3 plants. (57 are currently operational)

I think this is a more American-centric comment than you realized... France had a bigger rollout in the 80's and a few from the 90's so there's another decade (*making this time key!*) before a slow decline. Also remember that France is a lot smaller than America so needs less power.

Not to mention, France exports a lot of electricity[0]. I want you to look pretty closely at that graph again. It says they exported 81.8TW this year. What's France's nuclear capacity? 380TW[1]. France exports about 15% of its total energy, more than all its hydro (it's next biggest source). You may be interested to see where that electricity goes....[2]

France can lose those reactors and be fine, Europe is a different story...

  > 2: How many reactors has Europe built since 2005?

4, In Russia. But France built 2 reactors in 2002.

  > 3: What's the overrun time of reactors in Europe, compared to China?

I don't have an answer to this but

  > the institutional knowledge to bring it back to this quality does not exist

I can tell you that both France and the US are the biggest supporters of international aid in China's rollout. So the institutional knowledge exists and still progressing, albeit slower than before.

Besides, I'm not sure this fear even makes sense. What, China could "start from scratch" but "France" (or anywhere else) couldn't? What would make China so unique that such things couldn't be replicated elsewhere? This is a fallacy in logic making the assumption that once skills atrophy that they can never be restored or restore more slowly. If anything we tend to see skills restore far quicker from atrophy than from scratch! So why paint a picture of "give up"? Isn't that just making a self-fulfilling prophecy?

[0] https://analysesetdonnees.rte-france.com/en/exchanges/import...

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

[2] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/FR/72h/hourly

▲ mikestorrent 3 days ago | parent [-]

End of the day, it's just a big boiler; we invented it from scratch once, and it should be significantly easier to do it over again even if we do lose some knowledge. That said, the time to accelerate the industry really is now, before the situation gets any worse.

	▲	godelski 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think you're over simplifying things to the point far beyond what is useful to this conversation. While I disagree with the parent who is saying it is essentially a lost cause to restart the industry you go too far in the other direction suggesting it is a trivial endeavor, which misses all the complications that make them take years to build. Might as well say "End of the day, Google is just a text processor"