> the 2 units at Civaux Nuclear Power Plant, took 13 and 11 years from construction start in 1988/1991 to commercial operation in 2002:

At the time France was simultaneously building many reactors, see: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9acteurs_nucl%...

Some say that Flamanville-3 is a failure because it should be built along with many other reactors. This seems ridiculous to me, as if the problems (lack of adequate applied skill, bad project management... there is a complete official report about the causes, written by M. Folz) would be alleviated by parallelizing projects (it would instead worsen their effects and add delays).

> if they published optimistic numbers because they thought that there was more institutional tolerance

In France institutional tolerance for the nuclear industry is at its max. Start in 2007, to be delivered in 2012, nothing delivered in 2021 and 5.6 times over-budget... and no-one even talks about calling it off. Even better: M. Macron wants to start new projects!

I would bet on hubris here. In parallel with the Flamanville unit, they've been building EPR in Olkiluoto, Finland. There's a number of issues that have been shared by both of the projects, of course with some issues specific to each one. They agreed to deliver the Finnish plant on turnkey basis and are facing billions in losses because the quoted price is something like 1/3 of the final cost.