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"I really do believe that we should be investing in these technologies to make nuclear power safer." This is my major beef with nuclear power. We could invest

"I really do believe that we should be investing in these technologies to make nuclear power safer." This is my major beef with nuclear power. We could invest scads of dollars into expensive and fairly mature nuclear technology, or we can put that same amount of money into renewables which have tremendous room for improvement (that and money towards the advanced power grid that would make renewables also more efficient). I think it is a mistake to neglect the opportunity to shift focus.

pjscott 16y ago
Nuclear technology has a lot of room for improvement, too. There's some improvement that's relatively straightforward, like bringing capital costs down; China is working on this, with great success, as they can now construct CPR1000 plants cheaper than coal plants of the same size. Then we have more exotic and longer-range options, like breeder reactors (both uranium and thorium), small modular reactors, Brayton-cycle gas turbines instead of steam turbines, and so on. Nuclear technology seems stagnant, but the reasons for this are political rather than technical, and that's changing now. Edit: I forgot to mention clever applications that are possible without reactor modifications, like high-temperature hydrogen production, ammonia synthesis, desalination with waste heat, and so on.
- afterburner 16y ago
  You know, even if the opportunities for improvement were equal (and that is far from the case; solar power improvements look to be improving by an order of magnitude in the near term, for example), renewables still enjoy a massive safety advantage. So I say save the money and invest in something less fraught with hidden and/or potentially catastrophic costs. Fact is, even in this still-not-disastrous scenario, there are people working frantically trying to contain the reactors, risking radiation exposure and harm from explosions. If one hundred windmills had fallen over, or 100 solar panels been cracked, there would be no urgency, and the hardware could be replaced easily when it was safe to do so.

pjscott 16y ago

Nuclear technology has a lot of room for improvement, too. There's some improvement that's relatively straightforward, like bringing capital costs down; China is working on this, with great success, as they can now construct CPR1000 plants cheaper than coal plants of the same size. Then we have more exotic and longer-range options, like breeder reactors (both uranium and thorium), small modular reactors, Brayton-cycle gas turbines instead of steam turbines, and so on. Nuclear technology seems stagnant, but the reasons for this are political rather than technical, and that's changing now. Edit: I forgot to mention clever applications that are possible without reactor modifications, like high-temperature hydrogen production, ammonia synthesis, desalination with waste heat, and so on.

afterburner 16y ago
You know, even if the opportunities for improvement were equal (and that is far from the case; solar power improvements look to be improving by an order of magnitude in the near term, for example), renewables still enjoy a massive safety advantage. So I say save the money and invest in something less fraught with hidden and/or potentially catastrophic costs. Fact is, even in this still-not-disastrous scenario, there are people working frantically trying to contain the reactors, risking radiation exposure and harm from explosions. If one hundred windmills had fallen over, or 100 solar panels been cracked, there would be no urgency, and the hardware could be replaced easily when it was safe to do so.