3 ms·
> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs... No they don't, but they do blow up like industrial hydrogen gas explosions. Loss of coolant
by sradman 6y ago
> Reactors from civilian plants don’t blow up like atomic bombs...
No they don't, but they do blow up like industrial hydrogen gas explosions. Loss of coolant accidents are unforgiving in boiling water reactors and quickly fail catastrophically (in the engineering sense).
> the 1950s design CANDU reactor is small enough to be considered “modular”
Ummm, no. I stood in front of reactor #4 at Darlington just before it went into production. I think this was the last CANDU reactor to go into service in Canada. The scale of the reactor, the turbine hall, and the containment building are incomparable to anything else man-made that I've experienced.
The large size compared to equivalent boiling water reactors accounts for the CANDU's primary failing: it costs too much. Especially in the age of fracking, nuclear is uncompetitive cost wise compared to natural gas.
The supporters of nuclear energy and The Green New Deal both rely on a working assumption that the cost of CO2 emissions is the only important factor moving forward. Geographic and geopolitical considerations may play a significant role in continental Europe, Japan, and China but I have yet to hear a reasonable non-ideological argument against a natural gas centric strategy in North America.
- pfdietz 6y agoFast reactors could, in principle, blow up like atomic bombs (in the sense of having a prompt supercritical reaction with unmoderated neutrons.)
- yetanothermonk 6y agoIn practice though, there are control rods and MSRs have freeze plugs into drain tanks right?
- pfdietz 6y agoI was thinking fast reactors with fuel elements that could rearrange in a serious accident. That would be harder in a MSR, but concentration by precipitation or volatilization and condensation would have to be ruled out.
- manfredo 6y agoYes, nuclear power is more expensive than natural gas. But natural gas still emits carbon dioxide. If our goal is to curtail climate change, then our goal is to decarbonize our economy. There are additional culprits too like methane and some refrigerants. But carbon dioxide accounts for the lion's share of climate change.
- skitout 6y agoAnd nuclear is much much more expensive than solar or wind ! https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2019/
- manfredo 6y agoIn terms of raw generation costs, maybe. Nuclear's price is historically a factor of 4 less when built at scale. Building nuclear plants one at time, like the US is doing currently, does not leverage economies of scale. And when taking into account cost of storage, which is necessary when using intermittent sources, the actually cost increases drastically.