4 ms·

The problem is a lot of the tech advancements in the last 30 years of the field have not had a chance to play out and instead retrofits are all that's been roll

by cjslep 7y ago

The problem is a lot of the tech advancements in the last 30 years of the field have not had a chance to play out and instead retrofits are all that's been rolled out to the existing fleet. Criticizing an entire field based on the cutting edge 60 years ago feels really unfair. Additionally the modern US standard for safety regulation by the NRC is so stringent that anyone criticizing safety often sounds like spreading FUD if not specifically mentioning the caveat of either "outside the US" or "in the 70s". That's not to say there are "no problems" - to the contrary, age is the biggest problem. And there simply is no preparation for the end of the nuclear powerplant age, which is coming at this rate.

bjourne 7y ago
> The problem is a lot of the tech advancements in the last 30 years of the field have not had a chance to play out and instead retrofits are all that's been rolled out to the existing fleet. Criticizing an entire field based on the cutting edge 60 years ago feels really unfair. AP1000 is a new reactor design from the 2000s. Vogtle 3 and 4 are AP1000 reactors. The construction was started in 2013 and should have taken four years and costed 14.3 billion usd, but now it seems those reactors won't come online until 2022 to the cost of 27 billion usd. Lest anyone thinks that is because Americans are bad at building nuclear power, many other projects around the wold suffers from exactly the same cost and time overruns. http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/new-plants/ap1000-pwr/overview http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/new-plants/ap1000-pwr/ove... https://www.utilitydive.com/news/southern-increases-vogtle-nuke-pricetag-by-11-billion/529682/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/southern-increases-vogtle-n... https://theecologist.org/2014/sep/19/three-every-four-nuclear-power-builds-worldwide-are-running-late https://theecologist.org/2014/sep/19/three-every-four-nuclea...
- cjslep 7y ago
  You're bringing very fair critiques on costs and construction time to... a discussion about safety. There's many ways you could be implicitly connecting the dots to this discussion somehow. I welcome you making those clear. I am not going to put words in your mouth, though.

by cjslep 7y ago

bjourne 7y ago

> The problem is a lot of the tech advancements in the last 30 years of the field have not had a chance to play out and instead retrofits are all that's been rolled out to the existing fleet. Criticizing an entire field based on the cutting edge 60 years ago feels really unfair. AP1000 is a new reactor design from the 2000s. Vogtle 3 and 4 are AP1000 reactors. The construction was started in 2013 and should have taken four years and costed 14.3 billion usd, but now it seems those reactors won't come online until 2022 to the cost of 27 billion usd. Lest anyone thinks that is because Americans are bad at building nuclear power, many other projects around the wold suffers from exactly the same cost and time overruns. http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/new-plants/ap1000-pwr/overview http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/new-plants/ap1000-pwr/ove... https://www.utilitydive.com/news/southern-increases-vogtle-nuke-pricetag-by-11-billion/529682/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/southern-increases-vogtle-n... https://theecologist.org/2014/sep/19/three-every-four-nuclear-power-builds-worldwide-are-running-late https://theecologist.org/2014/sep/19/three-every-four-nuclea...

cjslep 7y ago
You're bringing very fair critiques on costs and construction time to... a discussion about safety. There's many ways you could be implicitly connecting the dots to this discussion somehow. I welcome you making those clear. I am not going to put words in your mouth, though.