Engineering Standardization Into a System

From Vox - Why America abandoned nuclear power (and what we can learn from South Korea):

"How did France pull this off? It helped that the country had only one utility (EDF) and one builder (Areva) working closely together. They settled on a few standard reactor designs and built them over and over again, often putting multiple reactors on a single site. That allowed them to standardize their processes and get better at finding efficiencies. Canada and Japan kept costs relatively stable with similar tactics.

Contrast this with the US, where our electricity sector is split up among dozens of different utilities and state regulators. As a result, US nuclear vendors had to develop dozens of variations on the light-water reactor to satisfy a variety of customers. That pushed up costs.

France's regulatory process was also less adversarial than America's — and, for better or worse, doesn't allow legal intervention by outside groups once construction gets underway. After the Soviet Union's Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the government tweaked safety rules, leading to some delays. But costs didn't skyrocket like they did in the US after Three Mile Island."