I disagree. But note that I never said it was Siemens fault. Or Framatome. I have no clue on that, so won’t make any claim on the subject.

And frankly, I don’t care. I look for flaws in processes, rather than trying to assign blame. Especially trying to assign blame to a country…

So my claim is that the design complexity is due to forcing Framatome (then Areva) and Siemens into designing something together. An alliance willed by politicians, in the name of Europe, or maybe French-German cooperation, but certainly not something wanted by the industrial players.

There lies the original flaw. The rest is just consequences.

I’m sure Framatome would have preferred to iterate on its own design (itself an iteration on a design of Westing House, Fr-am-atome stands for French-American-Atome). Same for Siemens.

12 years ago, when Germany decided to get out of nuclear power altogether, the EPR was already designed. Contracts were signed. Constructions ongoing.

Do you really think the design complexity would suddenly go away 12 years ago? France, UK, Finland and China signed for that overly complex EPR design, and that’s what they are getting.

Much faster in China, because they actually know how to build things, while in (at least some parts of) Europe we seem to have dropped the ball quite a bit… but that’s another subject.

The EPR was designed and sales contracts signed well before 2011. The bad decisions and designs didn't evaporate, it has taken all these years to complete the inherited projects. Olkiluoto 3 was supposed to be complete by 2010! You can read about everything that went wrong here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...