3 ms·
> On top of that, nuclear power needs a lot of water. This means they can become less reliable, especially once they age. > Not only does it need water, but th
by synecdoche 4y ago
> On top of that, nuclear power needs a lot of water. This means they can become less reliable, especially once they age.
> Not only does it need water, but the water can't stop for any reason without resulting in a disaster. You have to keep that spent fuel cool otherwise it'll burn itself.
I'd say your information is incomplete.
Nuclear power does not necessarily need water. Modern reactor designs do not use water at all, for example molten salt reactors that use salt for cooling instead of water.
Unlike wind power there are several ways to construct nuclear power plants, which eliminate the possibilities of several, if not all, of the scary failure modes, such as spontaneous meltdown, as is the case for the aforementioned reactor type. Instead of spontaneous meltdown of nuclear material, spontaneous lessening of nuclear activity is part of its design, in case total loss of control.
- bottlepalm 4y agoModern? They’ve been talking about ‘modern’ fail safe designs for decades. Where are they? The problem is none of the existing 400 reactors are fail safe and none are being built. Don’t use fantasy reactors that don’t exist to support the status quo.
- synecdoche 4y agoThe Oak Ridge National Laboratory MSRE that produced power safely from 1965-1969 is no fantasy, but a counter example, both to the fantasy claim and the water claim.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoExcept the design has countless flaws that make it impossible to actually deploy and when producing a meaningful amount of power (carefully avoided during the self described dog and pony shows) skates on the edge of prompt criticality which would destroy the building well before the freeze plug melted.
- synecdoche 4y agoAgain, no water. Educate us. How does it do those bad things? Where can we read about them?
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNah buddy. It's your garbage claim. It's on you to show that they won't go prompt critical, you have a plan for fuel separation that actually works, you have a way of containing the fission products (including the gaseous ones) and you have a solution to corrosion (good luck when the industry can't even get hot water that isn't the direct source of neutrons right). Otherwise it's just a fantasy. Like claiming 47% PV panels and 1kWh/kg batteries will be everywhere because they happened in a lab once.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoReactors aren't being built in the first place, the lack of building fail-safe designs says nothing.
- 7952 4y agoThe scary failure mode to the public for wind power can be easily mitigated. They have a buffer distance from places humans will be. So that if the turbine falls over or explodes no one will get hurt. You can make it safe with a map and a ruler.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoYour scifi fantasies that run a few tens of MW for a few hundred hours a year at a cost of billions aren't real designs. The only design that ever succeeded (and even then not really) is the GW scale LWR with a water secondary loop.