[montomike]

Actually, there are a few reasons...

There are no American manufacturers of the large components necessary for a nuclear power plant. The components all have long lead times for specifications and fabrication.

They all went away because of lack of demand and will need a few years to get to where the components can be manufactured in the US on a large scale of ten nuclear power plants a year. I am talking about the reactor vessel, the pressurizer, and the steam generators and last but not least, the large steam turbines and generators. You can’t jest go to Grainger and order a few.

San Onofre recently replaced four steam generators. They were made in Japan by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. And they are showing evidence of excessive wear and leaks after one fuel cycle. Made in Japan.....Google that.

Where are you going to get the engineers and the skilled craft to put together a nuclear power plant? This country isn’t producing engineers at the moment. Most of the engineers and craft that built the 120 or so power plants in the US at the moment are retired or retiring or trying to train the young skulls of mush before they get to retire. My personal experience with the new engineers was that they didn’t want to work that hard, didn’t have any fundamentals, were more interested in spending the large salaries they got coming out of college, and moved onto something easier as soon as they could plus they had no respect for their elders.

Building a nuclear power plant isn’t like mowing a lawn. There is a huge beaurocratic nightmare involved. Have you eseen the personnel required by regulations to work at a nuclear power plant? It isn’t just engineers, maintenance, and operators. A lot of people are needed to ensure compliance with the black hole of federal regulations. Take a look at the CFR’s for nuclear power plants. Mind boggling in their arcane complexity.

This country has a long ways to go, a few light years, before we will be able to build ten nuclear power plants a year.

[taildragger]

CE used to have the facilities in what was it Monongahela where they made stuff for their "Bowl Mills" and was that where they also made the Reactors Vessels as well?

I know they sold their ability to make these large parts...

[nuke rocketeer]

I work for Westinghouse. We are owned by Toshiba. Toshiba had considered building a heavy forging plant to make reactor vessels, but the environmental permitting is a nightmare designed to never allow such facilities to ever be built in the US again.

Bettis Labs, who makes Navy reactors also looked into expanding their facilities to make large civilian reactors and also were turned off by the permitting requirements.

[Unrepentant VN Vet]

...My personal experience with the new engineers was that they didn’t want to work that hard, didn’t have any fundamentals, were more interested in spending the large salaries they got coming out of college and moved onto something easier as soon as they could...

Possible amplification: Not only don't have the fundamentals, but are so completely dependent upon computer design aids that if CTRL C / CTRL V was disabled (or, worse yet, a loss of power) they wouldn't be able to function.

.....Possibly including an inability to feed themselves.