the military couldn't by itself. they use suppliers nowadays for everything, but they might.
China? well, autocracies look great at these. look at the map, pick the ideal site, appoint a few folks to do it. for every year late shoot one of them.
estimated delay is strictly less than a year.
of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen, and of course later usually it turns out that the problem came up back then during the project, but it was too inconvenient.
....
the problem with the "Western" process is that they are absolutely 120% political (it's nukes after all, eh), but it's dressed up in 42 layers of idiotic formalities, procurement tenders, domain expert committees, laws, local/regional/state/national/supranational bureaucracy processes, impact assessments, esoteric cost-benefit scoring methodologies, etc. all of this is because the politics is really muddy. so it's a very suboptimal compromise after all.
and it shows. basically it's the classic case of "sure, you get one plant, but it makes no sense in itself, because the economics calls for a fleet of 20+ standardized units and reprocessing" but also "sure, we just got one, that's uneconomical as hel, but we need to keep our nuclear industry/knowhow/capability alive"
and then 20-40 years later the public opinion is completely poisoned by that, and now reversing course requires a fucking war.
China? well, autocracies look great at these. look at the map, pick the ideal site, appoint a few folks to do it. for every year late shoot one of them.
estimated delay is strictly less than a year.
of course sometimes things like Chernobyl happen, and of course later usually it turns out that the problem came up back then during the project, but it was too inconvenient.
....
the problem with the "Western" process is that they are absolutely 120% political (it's nukes after all, eh), but it's dressed up in 42 layers of idiotic formalities, procurement tenders, domain expert committees, laws, local/regional/state/national/supranational bureaucracy processes, impact assessments, esoteric cost-benefit scoring methodologies, etc. all of this is because the politics is really muddy. so it's a very suboptimal compromise after all.
and it shows. basically it's the classic case of "sure, you get one plant, but it makes no sense in itself, because the economics calls for a fleet of 20+ standardized units and reprocessing" but also "sure, we just got one, that's uneconomical as hel, but we need to keep our nuclear industry/knowhow/capability alive"
and then 20-40 years later the public opinion is completely poisoned by that, and now reversing course requires a fucking war.