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These plants are all 40 years and older, which means they are EOL or close to it anyway. You could do another costly overhaul and squeeze a few more years out o
by this_user 3y ago
These plants are all 40 years and older, which means they are EOL or close to it anyway. You could do another costly overhaul and squeeze a few more years out of them, but the bottom line will be same.
- prepend 3y agoWhy would a power plant be EOL after 40 years. These are massive capital expenditures and I would expect a planned lifespan of 100-200 years. Having a 40 year designed lifespan on something that takes 10 years to build and 10 to shut off seems really bad.
- toast0 3y agoThe expectation when they were planned and built starting 50 years ago was that during their planned lifetime, nuclear power technology would improve significantly and they would naturaly be replaced with modern reactors at the end of their design lifetime. Of course, nobody planned for the Chernobyl disaster and the resulting lack of support for nuclear energy. Engineering wise, there are a lot of parts of the reactor that I think you have to pick between being able to service and replace the part and having it be useful and safe. So when those parts wear out, you can't really fix them. Or you have to wait so long for it to be safe to service them, that it's not worth it. Coal and gas plants don't last forever either, but they can generally be rebuilt in place, making the comparison tricky. Coal tends to release all of its radioactive waste into the air, the facility itself doesn't become a hazard to service.