Monju is an extreme case, but it’s not in a category by itself. Far from it. Nuclear power plants are one of the worst-performing project types in my database, with an average cost overrun of 120 percent in real terms and schedules running 65 percent longer than planned. Even worse, they are at risk of fat-tail extremes for both cost and schedule, meaning they may go 20 or 30 percent over budget. Or 200 or 300 percent. Or 500 percent. Or more. There is almost no limit to how bad things can get, as Monju demonstrated so spectacularly.
How Big Things Get Done - Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
What was so spectacular about Monju was that it was a nuclear power plant that over the entire lifetime of the project from when it started to generate electricity in 1994 to when it was decommissioned in 2016, a lifetime of only 22 years, it contributed to the grid for roughly one hour. For about 10 billion dollars. The table below gives a general timeline of the main events but yeah it was a spectacular failure.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1985 | Construction begins in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture |
| 1991 | Plant commissioning starts |
| Apr 1994 | Achieves initial criticality (self-sustaining nuclear reaction) |
| Aug 1995 | Connects to grid and generates first electricity |
| Dec 1995 | Sodium coolant leak causes fire, forcing shutdown |
| 2000-2005 | Legal battles over reactor safety; Supreme Court approves restart |
| May 2010 | Restarted after 14-years |
| Aug 2010 | Shut again after fuel-handling accident |
| Dec 2016 | Japanese government officially decides to decommission |
| 2047 | Planned completion of full decommissioning (30-year process) |
How does the book propose we avoid these spectacular failures? The key issue with these large projects is by definition they are one-off. And one-off projects have the worst outcomes. Everything is bespoke so people cannot use the learning factor to reduce unknowns. But, still, try to find some category which you can put the project into and try generalise things as much as possible. This way you can benefit from at least some learning curve from previous projects
For big projects like this, planning at early stages holds a lot of the potential for things to be de-risked and remove doubt. But what often happens is that plans change midway through by either things that are discovered, such as the type of bedrock under your skyscraper isn’t going to support the weight, to external factors like the developer changing the design. The first type can be mitigated as much as possible through planning but the second is all on this project and can be entirely mitigated by proper leadership and planning. Be clear what is in scope and make sure that scope does not change after a certain point.
Overall a good book if even just a bit curious how big projects can go wrong and what might help prevent this