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Nicholas Pretzel's avatar

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you, not just for your informative posts but for a convention you use in your writing that I rarely see nowadays (actually, I think you're the only person, apart from me, that I've noticed using it): before you use an Abbreviation/Acronym (A/A) you do what I just did, expand it and introduce the A/A in parentheses. I don't know if it's mainly American posts on politics, but I find it really irritating when I have to repeatedly interrupt my reading to look up an A/A, so much so that I've got a easily accessible note with all the ones I've come across that's got about 130 entries so far. I realize that the whole purpose of A/As is to avoid repeatedly writing relatively lengthy phrases, but the key word there is ‘repeatedly’. It's really just common courtesy not to assume that everyone reading knows what your A/As mean. So thank you for having the courtesy of explaining your A/As 😊.

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Tim Smyth's avatar

I would argue that with the Sizewell C project Britain as hard as it is to believe is actually somewhat ahead of the US in constructing new nuclear. Remember in the US Vogtle is now finished and at the moment there is no follow on AP1000 project to Vogtle while Britain actually has a strategy to keep building EPR's. In all likelihood the next AP1000s will be built in Poland and other parts of Europe.

Another comment I will make is that in terms of construction time Sizewell B was actually a fairly successful project undertaken long after the US and many other countries had completely stopped building new nuclear. Sizewell B was constructed in roughly 5 years from 1991 to 1996. At that point the last new nuclear power plant in the US had last started construction in 1978. Sizewell B was also the first PWR built in the UK. What makes Sizewell B unsuccessful (and to be clear there is a good chance Sizewell B will operate for 100 years so success is a relative term) is there was basically a 10-year period of lawsuits and paperwork leading up to the plant's groundbreaking. BTW, this is actually a pretty good time frame compared to the fifth and largest air terminal at Heathrow Airport(Terminal 5) which spent almost 25 years in various planning and legal disputes before any construction ever started.

**Interesting video below from the construction period of Sizewell B.

https://youtu.be/FyRRBP1WqpQ?si=bR6emAwpAUyDUeDp&t=29

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