Originally Posted by OVERKILL
Originally Posted by buster
Great info OVERKILL, thank you. So beside the cost factor, what is the main obstacle facing nuclear energy as an alternative? Perception of safety? The Chernobly series on HBO probably didn't help any. What are the current risks facing modern nuclear plants? Making nuclear establishments safe from natural disasters?
*Please don't make this political, we are all adults here. This is a serious issue that needs to be dealt with IMO.
I posted this to learn. I'm not familiar with this subject.
Biggest obstacle beyond cost is regulatory environment followed by public perception, which varies massively by geography. Remember, there have been disinformation campaigns waged by the likes of the Sierra Club (fossil fuel front) and Greenpeace conflating civilian nuclear power with nuclear weapons, spreading fear and lies....etc for decades. There was an oceanographic wave height chart being used at one point as a map of the radiation flow from Fukushima for example, and people believed it and shared it, even though the legend on the bloody map indicated wave height!
Current risks also vary on reactor design and siting. Our plants in Canada are insanely safe because of how they were designed, and this was because we had our own tiny incident back in the 1950's at Chalk River that resulted in a leak, and so preventing that in all future iterations of anything designed by AECL became paramount. Our plants are also not going to get exposed to a tsunami (Fukushima) because none of them are on the ocean.
When you ask about modern plants, are you talking about 3rd gen or 4th gen designs? 3rd gen designs like the EPR are more like evolutions of existing designs with even better safety mechanisms and more automation, whilst the 4th gen designs (think SMR's) are mostly clean slate which vary significantly in design, cooling, fuel....etc. Many of them are passively cooled and don't require traditional waterbody cooling for example. Others are designed to run on existing waste stores. All of them are designed to be "walk away safe"; essentially meltdown proof.
China's indigenous Hualong One design, which borrows heavily from the builds they partnered on with Westinghouse and Areva, is a 3rd gen design, so, unlike the SMR's, these are big, high output plants. While China is actively pursuing SMR's, they lack the CAPEX problem (state funding) that new builds elsewhere are facing, and so pursuing series builds of a 3rd gen design appears to be their current trajectory, with 30+ of these units planned.
You Canadians are fairly protected from natural disasters compared to the US, you have plenty of water and your climate makes nuclear a good choice.
Solar is extremely viable on the lower half of the United States. The climate is much more conducive outside of the Great Lakes area and NE US. Interestingly those are great places for Nuclear.