This is about building a French nuclear reactor design that was previously constructed in the UK at Hinkley Point.

French state energy company EDF and Chinese CGN were on board primarily as investors as part of quite a complex deal. EDF provided the design and CGN had some expertise building that design in China.

Like any nuclear design a local design team would have customized it for the site and got it through UK nuclear authorization and then the actual constrution work would have been farmed out to UK construction companies with specialist components like the reactor vessel being built in France by EDFs usual subcontractors. It's fair to say that after Hinkley Point was completed the knowledge of how to build this design has probably been transfered completely to workers in the UK.

Under the Hinkley Point deal, the UK government promised to pay a high price for electricity in future and underwrite the profitabliity of the project if and only if the reactors EDF was constructing elsewhere in Europe and China were built on time. There was a huge problem with the reactor vessel and construction at a lot of these plants needed to be re-done so they missed this deadline and ended up making a huge loss. Both EDF and CGN took a huge loss on Hinkley Point. It has been a major contributor to EDFs financial problems and the French government has had to bail them out by billions of pounds. Maybe same for CGN, don't know.

It can be assumed that Sizewell C was a carrot being dangled in front of EDF and CGN - continue to throw good money after bad on Hinkley Point and you'll be able to make it up on Sizewell C using your experience on the previous project to do everything right first time and make loads of profit.

UK has presumably screwed CGN pretty badly by now throwing them off the "make up your losses" project. Presumably they broke a lot of promises made by previous UK leaders. The question is - what legal / financial exposure does this create for the UK?

Will the UK incur big penalties and end up making a huge payment to CGN to compensate them for the rug pull, or are they effectively going to burn Chinese (CGN and state) good will and make a huge profit, which might be an acceptable sacrifice given they probably care less about that good will now than they did in 2012 when this was negotiated...

But to come back to your original point - in terms of the technology this is already a French design being built, and changing that would incur a decade of delay. No in for the US on that front. However there may be a funding hole for US private equity to fill...

[removed]