In most of the industry "Agile" is just "doing waterfall really quickly", and for some reason nobody understands you have to stand during your daily micromanagement meetings.
> this only works in a team of professionals with shared goals (and alignment on them!), each individually competent and motivated.
Counterpoint: I learned a variant of agile in exactly this type of environment, long before any of this was publicized. Which is another point: agile wasn't something new, certainly not at the time of the manifesto, which was a compromise document. But not even before the manifesto. XP, arguably the first agile methodology, very clearly and deliberately stated that this is nothing new, just a distillation of things that experience has shown to work well.
Anyway, at my next job I introduced agile (small-a-agile) to a team that was anything but skilled. In fact, that team was where the leftovers of that particular development organization had been shunted (public company, very difficult to get rid of people). When I arrived, the team was as non-functional as the software it was responsible for. Well...
We rocked.
And all the team member improved dramatically in skill during my tenure there. Including myself.
We did not do Agile. No scrum, no standups, no sprints, none of that BS. We were agile. We focused on the technical practices. Test first. Red-green-commit. To trunk, obviously. Because if it's green why on earth would you not? Do the simplest thing that could possibly work. We had a design for a database and then never found a need to put it in...so we didn't.
It took a while for the other parts of the org to adapt to this. The answer to the common question "well, when can you deploy?" was always "now". Well after a quick look that the tests were, in fact, green. So they stopped asking. The tests were rarely not green, and when it did happened there was usually a quick "Oops, I'm sorry" and they went green again a couple of minutes later. Our ops team got bored very quickly. Put jar on box. Start. Forget about it.
What made the experience scientifically interesting is that we had a control group: the main team, much larger, working on the "important" software with all the "good" engineers started with a new project about the same time we did.
They did Agile. Capital-A. Scrum, sprints, standups.
They did not deliver and in fact the project had to be completely reset about two years in. My team-lead (we were co-lead, I did mostly internal/technical, he external/managerial) then got to take over that team as I left for Apple.
TFA, incidentally, is just about as good summary of misunderstandings of agile as I've seen.
Not much to add just wanted to say I share the sentiment and it matches my experience :-) .
I'm not smart enough to NOT keep it simple; 90% of stuff I work on at $company is really a CRUDbox and I do NOT want to "astronaut-architect" the whole thing.
Comprehensive test-suite, push to prod multiple times a day, feedback, dev.
Yeah, sometimes I feel that most of my "amazing architecture skills" is not understanding what 90% of that stuff is supposed to do or why, and hey, maybe we can just do without it?
For reference: what we did was replace an existing system, which was running over a hundred processes on about a half dozen boxes. We replaced it with a jar.
The jar was around 1000x faster, 100x more reliable, 10x less code while handling around 10x more of the domain.
Yeah: as a result of doing small-a-agile for a while.
Not at the start.
I guess if the point is that agile doesn't work for incompetent teams because teams become much more competent through agile, then I'll concede the point.
Sweden isn't investing in nuclear power. The current right wing government is creating a culture war issue while not wanting to accept the costs, nor creating a deal that will survive through elections by creating a more comprehensive coalition backing it.
They've moved "We'll start building this electory cycle!!" to "large scale reactors" to "SMRs!!" to now targetting the final investment decision in 2029.
The latest step in the saga is the state owned power company refusing to get their credit rating tarnished by being too involved in the nuclear project. The latest move is them owning 20%, the industry owning 20% and the government owning 60%.
The industry still haven't comitted to their 20% due to the absolutely stupid costs involved.
With the government as a first negotiation move stepping in with a direct handout of €3B. On top of credit and construction guarantees, a CFD and adjusting it all depending on how costly the build is to guarantee a profit.
But it is quite easy to understand why. Taking what one of the nuclear reactors earns in Sweden and then applying solely the interest from a new build leads to a loss of ~€1.5B per year. Then you also need to run, fuel and maintain the plant.
Reality does not seem to want to conform to your creative confabulations.
"Once committed to phasing out nuclear power, Sweden has reversed course, not only lifting the ban on new reactors but also introducing government frameworks to accelerate investments and deployment.
Today, Sweden’s nuclear roadmap includes commissioning two large-scale reactors to add 2.5GW of capacity by 2035 and the equivalent of 10 new reactors, with a push for smaller modular reactors (SMRs), by 2045. According to GlobalData, the country is on course to reach 8.2GW in nuclear capacity and 59.8TWh in annual generation by 2035." -- Inside Sweden’s policy U-turn: Q&A with the Government’s nuclear lead
"Nuclear, onshore wind cheapest way to meet Sweden's electricity needs, OECD report says
If nuclear builds become more expensive or electricity imports cheaper, "there might be an opening for offshore wind to enter Sweden's optimal capacity mix", the report said. "For the time being, this is not the case."" -- https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/nuclear-onshore-wind-cheap...
"Nordic governments are pushing ahead with nuclear energy investments at a pace not seen in decades, driven by growing anxiety over energy security and the need to cut carbon emissions. " -- https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/nordic-countri...
"Sweden’s nuclear landscape has done a 180-turn in recent years, moving from plans for a phase-out now to ambitions for an expansion. The government has lifted the reactor cap, opened new sites and introduced measures to accelerate investments and deployments.
Kärnfull Next has submitted an application to build a power plant based on small modular reactors in the municipality of Valdemarsvik in Östergötland county in southeastern Sweden. It is the first application under the country’s new Act on Government Approval of Nuclear Facilities." -- https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/application-subm...
"Sweden Reverses Nuclear Phase-Out, Plans Major Expansion by 2045
According to a report from Power Technology, Sweden has reversed its nuclear energy policy in recent years, abandoning previous phase-out plans in favor of expansion. The national government has removed a cap on the number of reactors, designated new locations for plants, and implemented policies to speed up related investment and construction. The current national strategy aims to increase nuclear power capacity by a minimum of 2.5 gigawatts by 2035. A further goal is to build new reactors with a combined capacity equal to ten standard units by 2045." -- https://www.indexbox.io/blog/sweden-reverses-nuclear-phase-o...
Like I told you. A culture war issue without broader political backing, with the company putting final investment decision at such a timing in terms of election cycles as to ensure that broad political backing is there, or it won’t happen.
The social democrats opened up to negotiate a broader energy agreement covering both nuclear power and off-shore wind.
The right and hard right shut down that effort because only tens of billions in handouts per new built large scale reactor in capacity is the only solution. Even mentioning off-shore wind is a red like for them.
It is truly interesting when the right becomes the socialists. But that’s were we are in 2026.
Also, go ahead and please explain how Sweden can have 2.5 GW online by 2035 when investment decision is set to 2029 and projects like the Canadian SMF, French EPR2 and Polish AP1000 have similar dates as their ”perfectly executed project target date”, likely ending up being late 2030s or early 2040s?
It’s always funny when you proclaim imaginary new built nuclear power as the solution, rather than staying grounded in reality.
You are. As evident by all your ramblings, desperately clinging to outdated talking points.
All you know is that half a century old nuclear power works acceptably. Built in an entirely different economic era.
What we also know is that forcing new built nuclear power costs on the ratepayers would lead to an energy crisis. You can pay it with the taxes, but that doesn't make the cost dissappear.
Why waste trillions on handouts and decades of opportunity cost on new built nuclear power when renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history?
We still need to decarbonize industry, aviation, shipping, construction, agriculture etc. We don't have the luxury of dallying with the dead end that is new built nuclear power we have already confirmed.
Actually France knows how to build them cheaper and quicker.
Their whole nuclear industry (reactors and all) cost just €228 billion. And they built 50+ reactors in just 15 years.
They know how this works, and so do we: standardize a design, build lots of them, in overlapping lots so experience accumulates and knowledge gained from earlier builds can be passed on and applied to newer builds. This also worked for Germany with the Konvois, even though only 3 got built and the same technique is now working for the Chinese, who copied it from us.
With Flamanville 3, the French did none of these things. Why not?
They weren't allowed to do so. Politically. France actually was on a long-term nuclear exit trajectory. The Mitterand government put a law in place that not just demanded reduction of the nuclear share to 50% of total electricity production, it also capped the total permitted capacity to what was installed at the time: exactly 63.2 GW.
So they could not build any additional nuclear power plants, meaning they could only build new plants (to retain the know-how of how to build them) if they turned equivalent existing capacity off.
Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.
But in order to retain their industrial capacity, they did just that idiotic thing, knowing that it would be idiotic. The 2 reactors at Fessenheim were turned off to allow exactly 1 new EPR to be built at Flamanville.
Not a standardized design, a brand new design. And a design that was also troubled, see:
And not a lot of them, just a single one. And with a single one, obviously also no overlaps.
So that went about as well as one might expect: not at all.
Now the law has been removed, they have 14 EPR2 reactors of a new simplified design planned, with a first batch of 6 in lots of 2 each at 3 sites coming up.
I was a bit confused about the Mitterand gov't claim, that seems to be a Hollande gov't thing from 2014. In particular after 2011 (with Fukushima on the minds of Europeans... not to debate how much those concerns made sense), and part of policy alignments with the socialist party and the greens
Found this 2023 article with Hollande not feeling the need to apologize for this policy[0]. I would like to point out that here Hollande at least points out the following:
- at the time polling showed 65-80% of people wanting an off-ramp
- this was kinda premised on the idea of leaning into renewables, which feels fine. If you can build a wind farm or solar in some spots might as well! There's not much morally wrong with the tech
There's definitely an argument to saying that its the responsibility of politicians and gov'ts to convince people to make the right decisions, but if 80% of people are like "we want to move our electricity grid to rely more on renewables" it's hard to argue to _not_ do it. And 50% is still 50%!
> Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.
This is the thing I'm not quite sure about. Like Fessenheim (which, IIRC, was the oldest) ended up working for 40+ years. Now... I'm not sure but if this plant was the oldest, then France was decomissioning older plants right? So either all of these politicians are being too "scared" to run the plant for 80 years.... or the lifetime of these plants really are less than 50 years.
I don't know how much of the reduction of nuclear share played a role in everything. We're talking about Hollande, a one-term president, establishing this in the wake of Fukushima. It wasn't the state of things in 2010, right?
I do get the argument of "don't lose the muscle memory" for cost control cases alone. I don't think that "build some renewables because wind is also quite nice when you can use it" is an unreasonable ask either (don't need water to cool wind turbines!).
I do appreciate the color on EPR though. I knew EPR was a bit of a mess but I get what you're saying about building 14 of the same thing vs just one of em.
And yes, of course they wanted to replace nuclear with renewables, what else were they going to replace it with?
But that doesn't work. See Germany. Which is why that plan has now been laid to rest.
Without shutting off Fessenheim, Flamanville 3 would have been illegal under the Hollande law:
"On 9 April 2017, the plant was ordered to close after the Flamanville 3 unit comes online, expected to begin operation in late 2018, later reported to 2019, keeping the French nuclear generation capacity below the legal limit of 63.2 GWe." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fessenheim_Nuclear_Power_Plant...
And there was also strong political opposition to Fessenheim. The Fessenheim closure was not technical.
The French reactors are based on Westinghouse designs, and those reactors are currently being extended to 80 year lifespan in the US. So I don't see why they shouldn't be capable of the same lifetime in France, though the French do drive them a bit harder.
And the worst power-production disaster in history so far was neither Fukushima nor Chernobyl, but the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And it's not even close.
It's a farce.
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