3 ms·
That’s less than the 20% we get now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_Un
by melling 4y ago
That’s less than the 20% we get now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_...
“ for 20% of the nation's total electric energy generation.[3] In 2018, nuclear comprised nearly 50 percent of US emission-free energy generation.”
Didn’t the United States build 100 nuclear power plants in about 25 years?
- epistasis 4y agoYes, and the problem was that way too many of them were over budget and delayed. Even before Three Mile Island, orders for new nuclear had slowed massively because utilities realized that ther massive risk for financial boondoggles. Those nuclear reactors are now reaching their end of life, and will need to be phased out. France is realizing what happens when you don't replace your aging fleet fast enough: massive unreliability and extended shutdowns for maintenance and fixing things. France also started to build new nuclear in the 2000s, at Flamanville, but it has been an utter debacle, that's ongoing to this day. It's to the point that even though the president has said he's going to order more reactors, it seems unlikely that many of them will ever complete.
- diordiderot 4y agoWhat if you just kept building them, learning each time, building tacit knowledge and economics of scale?
- epistasis 4y agoBuilding the same model of reactor a second, third, and fourth time has resulted in increasing cost in both the US and France. There are a few countries that have shown positive learning rather than negative learning, but there's questions about how much of that is from corruption and cheating rather than actual process improvements. (I'm thinking of South Korea here)