Not sure what privatisations have to do with the problem. My understanding is that it is a combination of a technical problem (corrosion happening at an unexpected pace) and the impact of covid lockdowns which deferred critical maintenance.
Privatization has everything to do with the problem. Let's take EDF and our nuclear plants. Why is EDF struggling financially today ? Because, through the magic of _opening up to the market_, they have been forced to sell up to 100TWh are prices as low as €40/MWh. The new private operators that came in simply resold that. And right now ? They're even kicking out clients, just so they could sell on the market at €1000/MWh. What does EDF struggling financially mean ? Among others, fully depending on the state to give them the money they need to exist, not being able to keep training and maintain specialists to repair such corrosion (we needed to import people because there were simply not enough qualified engineers for that), not being able to build more plants and therefore losing our edge in nuclear power.
Why are most of our public services struggling ? Because over time, they've been handed out to private companies. Unemployment office ? Partly privatized. Tax collection from employers ? Privatized. Healthcare ? Partly privatized, and the beast is being starved so they can privatize it more.
There has not been a single, memorable outcome of a public service being privatized in France and it getting better.
> they have been forced to sell up to 100TWh are prices as low as €40/MWh.
Should be plenty. The Swedish paid off nuclear plants operate around €25/MWh. Lazard similarly puts the range for paid-off nuclear plants at $24-$33/MWh.
It's easy to underpay nuclear power then realize heavy investments are needed after a while to either keep the plants alive with modern safety norms or to dismantle them (we have done that a lot here, electricity used to be cheap).
Also EDF has been trying to build the EPR in England, Finland and France, and it costed much more to build than budgeted. And someone has to pay the difference. And it seems that this someone is us :) (French tax payers and consumers)
> Also EDF has been trying to build the EPR in England, Finland and France, and it costed much more to build than budgeted. And someone has to pay the difference. And it seems that this someone is us :) (French tax payers and consumers)
My view is that it is a subsidy for the naval nuclear reactors and weapons programs in UK and France that they choose to pay from a national security perspective. The French and UK public simply gets to eat the costs with barely any say in the matter.
How do you get that? In the UK our nuclear weapons are US bought so we don't use any fissile materials we make, and my understanding was submarine reactors are very different to traditional utility scale reactors, to the point that different companies produce them.
It is all about creating the industrial base with people going through university specializing in it. This is from last time I googled the topic:
In 2017 this angle was up in the news in the UK. Take the responses as you like.
> The government is using the “extremely expensive” Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to cross-subsidise Britain’s nuclear weapon arsenal, according to senior scientists.
> In evidence submitted to the influential public accounts committee (PAC), which is currently investigating the nuclear plant deal, scientists from Sussex University state that the costs of the Trident programme [1] could be “unsupportable” without “an effective subsidy from electricity consumers to military nuclear infrastructure”.
> [...]
> This week, the Green MP Caroline Lucas asked the government about the Ministry of Defence and the business department discussing the “relevance of UK civil nuclear industry skills and supply chains to the maintaining of UK nuclear submarine and wider nuclear weapons capabilities”.
> Harriett Baldwin, the defence procurement minister, answered that “it is fully understood that civil and defence sectors must work together to make sure resource is prioritised appropriately for the protection and prosperity of the United Kingdom”.
> [...]
> At the PAC hearing, the Labour MP Meg Hillier asked whether “Hinkley is a great opportunity to maintain our nuclear skills base”.
> Lovegrove answered: “We are completing the build of the nuclear submarines which carry conventional weaponry. So somehow there is very definitely an opportunity here for the nation to grasp in terms of building up its nuclear skills. I don’t think that’s going to happen by accident. It is going to require concerted government action to make that happen.”
> Andrew Stirling believes that there was a crucial, largely unspoken, reason for the government’s rediscovered passion for nuclear: without a civil nuclear industry, a nation cannot sustain military nuclear capabilities. In other words, no new nuclear power plants would spell the end of Trident. “The only countries in the world that are currently looking at large-scale civil power newbuild programmes are countries that have nuclear submarines, or have an expressed aim of acquiring them,” Stirling told me.
> Building nuclear submarines is a ferociously complicated business. It requires the kind of institutional memory and technical expertise that can easily disappear without practice. This, in theory, is where the civil nuclear industry comes in. If new nuclear power plants are being built, then the skills and capacity required by the military will be maintained. “It looks to be the case that the government is knowingly engineering an environment in which electricity consumers cross-subsidise this branch of military security,” Stirling told me.
It’s “simply mismanagement” is a trivial tautology that can be applied to any situation.
Team didn’t deliver? Mismanaged the team. Team failed to deliver because they didn’t do any work? Mismanaged the hiring process. Massive wild fire? Mismanaged forests. Asteroid wipes out all life on Earth? Mismanaged the planetary defense systems. Andor escapes from Narkina 5? Mismanaged imperial prison complex.
Given that nuclear power plants are known entities and the list of "unknown unknowns" should be non-existent given their safety critical nature it simply is mismanagement.
If your nuclear plant costs more than $33/MWh to operate then you are doing something wrong and stop trying to blame "the green movement", "privatization" or whatever.
so costs to build operate and maintain something never changes and is the exact same everywhere and in every country and if it’s different then what you think it’s “mismanagement”?
Because I’m pretty sure it’s going to be different from France to America to poland
> The LCOE figures for existing Generation II nuclear power plants integrating post-Fukushima stress tests safety upgrades following refurbishment for extended operation (10-20 years on average): (in 2012 euros) €23/MWh to €26/MWh (5% and 10% discount rate).
There, from a source extremely positively biased towards nuclear.
> Among others, fully depending on the state to give them the money they need to exist, not being able to keep training and maintain specialists to repair such corrosion (we needed to import people because there were simply not enough qualified engineers for that), not being able to build more plants and therefore losing our edge in nuclear power.
EDF is struggling because the state kept intervening and asking them to shut down future nuclear plants.
You can't have specialists if they are retiring and the state destroyed any career prospects due to planning they would shut down plants...
> EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[6] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[7] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.[8][2]
Incomplete and biased analysis. What you describe as 'privatization' is nothing like a free market which is what most people think you're describing.
Privatization in your case is crony capitalism combined with state power to manipulate markets in favor of certain actors. The key enabler in this scheme is government power corrupted by money.
The commonality in all the different areas that are failing -- power, healthcare, homelessness, etc.. --- are the regulatory systems that are grossly distorted by corrupted government interventions.
The main problem with governments and their services today is that there is no real feedback loop and systems without feedback are doomed to fail. You can vote liberal or conservative and nothing changes because they are two wings of the same bird.
Maybe there's no "good" capitalism? What we used to think of as "good" capitalism was really heavy government investment leading to a "virtuous feedback loop", for which the Government got no credit?
I think that's more accurate then the "not TRUE capitalism"/no true Scotsman interpretation.
Let me be clear: I mean setting prices with market mechanisms, which all the "mixed economies" do. There's really no alternative to it for the economy as a whole (although government adjustments due to externalities, for example, are needed.)
> the recent gas cap for Russian oil as the hand of the market?
As not market pricing? Markets work to find the most efficient economic solution, or at least local maxima. But everything isn’t economics. National security, for instance. So we take economic pain in exchange for national security outcomes. Domestic energy markets are different from international ones.
Markets are essential. A modern industrial economy cannot function without markets to provide prices for the millions of different things being produced. This is why the Soviet Union failed and why China moved to allow a market to operate.
Right, but price setting via market mechanisms is orthogonal to capital ownership.
I'm increasingly convinced that we should strive towards an impure market socialist system because control of large corporations that are more powerful than some countries really doesn't belong in private hands.
And I say impure because some amount of private ownership to capture entrepreneurial spirits is a good idea. But Fortune 500 companies aren't about entrepreneurial spirits.
