During the US 1950-70s power plant build, the business model of a consortium of utilities handling most of the work in building an NPP had several advantages.
The first advantage of the US model is that it offered flexibility. A project was easily customisable, so a plant suitable for a particular geographical area could be built. Utilities could choose the vendor, and the system design they wanted. And with each passing project, utilities built up a large labour force of highly skilled technical specialists. Thus, utilities soon had a large and very sophisticated labour force.
Funding could then be reasonably easily obtained, as, once the project was approved by the Public Utilities Commission, utilities could draw funding from the ratepayer base of their area.
However, this system also contained the roots of the current problems of nuclear build in the US. It favoured a large number of different types of reactors being built in different geographical areas.
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This worked against what are now key features of international nuclear build: standardising the type of reactor being built on just one basic design, and having a large organisation build all of it over and over again in different locations (or in countries overseas), for economies of scale. No matter how good a utility was at building a nuclear plant in a particular area, there was no way for it to then build the same plant at a different geographical area. Once a project was finished, there was no follow-up project of the same nature to maintain expertise.
The model outside of the US
Contrast this with how nuclear power plants (NPPs) were built in France and South Korea. Basically, after initial technology transfer, one standardised design was built by a set of companies strictly controlled by one or
more large national organisations overseeing everything.
In France, the CP series was built after technology transfer from Westinghouse. In South Korea, the Korean Standard Nuclear Power Plant, now the OPR-1000, was built following technology transfer from … [please fill in the form to continue reading.]
