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No, its because people run around screaming about "problems" where there are known engineering solutions. Instead they choose to remain willfully ignorant, or i
by StillBored 5y ago
No, its because people run around screaming about "problems" where there are known engineering solutions. Instead they choose to remain willfully ignorant, or ignore those solutions.
There are untold piles of designs that have never been built due to fear. Many of them solve problems with proliferation, or are fail safe with regards to meltdowns, but they never see the light of day because people run around fearmongering about issues which are basically nonexistent, or solved. Now granted, for example, pebble beds (which tend to be quite robust to both proliferation as well as meltdowns) have other issues with respect to how uneaven the fuel burns and how hard it is to reprocess. But that in many ways is by design. I mean we don't have "problems" with current reactors where we take ~95% of the fuel out and call it "waste".
And so much of modern reactor design is basically building a giant bomb shelter around the plant, that even in the face of full blown wars its hard to see how the reactors are any more dangerous than many other heavy industries we take for granted (aka do you know what your local mega fab is storing onsite?)
- ncmncm 5y agoNo, it's because nukes were and are fantastically expensive, and the projects are often cancelled with exactly zero watt-hours produced after massive cost overruns and absurd delays.
- StillBored 5y agoThats because the NRC (and similar agencies) exist effectively to assure that the cost is such that no nuke plants ever get built. Not a single NRC approved plan has ever been built, and its in no small part because of the billions of dollars in paper pushing politicians/etc getting in the way of people who actually design and build stuff. Nuke plants are hardly more complex than a combined cycle gas generator, and those are pretty inexpensive. (see also Korea for an example of building plants for less than the entire GDP of a country) If solar/wind had 1/2 of the regulatory overhead to assure that say the thorium tailings from rare earth mining (neodymium/etc) never got into the drinking water/air/etc then you would never see a single new solar/windmill either.
- ncmncm 5y agoThere is no reason for solar or wind to suffer regulatory overhead. They pose no existential threat if built or operated unsafely. Worst case, they fall over.
- StillBored 5y agoMore people died in the Texas grid failure last year than have died in all the Nuke plant accidents. Unreliable power is dangerous too.
- ncmncm 5y agoThe Texas grid failure was a product of under-regulation, not use of renewables. Responsible management requires back-up generation capacity that works when needed. What failed in Texas was that the (gas-fired) back-ups were not mandated to work when cold, and so didn't.
- StillBored 5y agoA large part of the "under-regulation" is that renewables aren't required, like other parts of the system to assure availability and file offline requests. Combined with the fact that wind/solar economically pressure the reliable sources, because they only make money when the green energy sources fail, means that basic maintenance/etc gets deferred. So, sure shift the blame to the "backup sources" rather than mentioning that the wind farms were operating at something like 5% of the nameplate capacity.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]