If the customer keeps demanding changes of course you get delays as a result. The major delay was caused by the Chinese issuing a one year stop construction order after Fukushima to review all new reactor construction. Then you get revisions and changes to the design and you get delays. Little surprise there.

They sold a turnkey nuclear power plant to Finland for $3.5 billion and I think the current cost so far is $8 billion and it isn't finished yet.

They did get the dividends by having the cheapest electricity in Europe.

Only problem is the construction of pumped storage is expensive like heck.

Yeah the economy under Stalin was wildly successful. Even when Lenin was in power a large part of the time it was Stalin pulling the strings of it all. Even if the regime was murderous you cannot deny it was economically successful. A large part of the success was due to the large industrialization drives. The national electrification plan, the heavy industries, making education and housing available for everyone, creating a middle class and increasing productivity, etc. This is something which can be done in a country much like the USSR was. A country with a lot of natural resources and manpower but poor infrastructure. It could also have been done with a lot less strife. Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan managed to do it. The problem was the Soviet Union wanted to do what they did in two decades in just one. Instead of starting with light industry first and do things progressively they just squeezed the farmers out of everything they had and jumped straight into the heavy industry.

Krushchev did some poor investments and by the time Breznev came around the economy started to stagnate. Too many resources were kept on the military industrial side of things at the same time as the rest of the industry collapsed. When Gorbachev came around they found they had little to no oil left they could economically recover at the same time they were stuck on an expensive and useless war on Afghanistan. They needed to replace their oil industry equipment with more modern technology and they did not have the funds to do it themselves anymore.

The amortized costs are cheaper. The capital expenditure costs are only a problem if you don't have the capital to invest in it.

In the USA nuclear power companies are forced to pay money towards a decommissioning fund. Other countries may do different schemes. And they do pay for insurance schemes as well.

The old French reactor designs, based on a US Westinghouse design, were just fine. It's the EPR design they did with Siemens (a German company) that's too expensive and complicated to build. Add to that a couple of decades not actually building any reactors and it is hardly a surprise that they need to relearn some things all over again. Add to that using a lot of local work in Finland with zilch prior experience building concrete and steel structures to these kinds of specifications and shoddy oversight and this kind of thing happens.

AFAIK the Chinese 3rd generation reactors (Westinghouse AP1000) seem to be mostly on time. The only delay was that the government ordered them to stop construction for a year because they decided to go all over the paperwork again for all new nuclear reactors being build after Fukushima.

To a large degree I think the problem is actually lack of practice actually building power plants. So of course the cost and time estimates aren't accurate enough. EPR is a new reactor design.

Coal is a naturally occurring compound. So is uranium. Just because it is 'naturally occuring' it doesn't mean it isn't dangerous you twit.

Coal fly ash is dangerous and toxic.

Kingston, Tennessee, coal sludge toxic spill (2008).

Actually there are some senior citizens living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. People could live there just fine. It just not a good idea to grow any vegetables in there or dig around the dirt too much.

The reactor itself was fine. It was just built on the wrong place. You aren't supposed to build a reactor like that in a flooding prone area.

The problem with Fukushima was less the reactor and more the fact that it was in a flooding area. Some reactor designs will be less prone to flooding than this design but flooding is flooding.