Originally Posted by OVERKILL
There has been a grand total of 1 death attributable to the accident at Fukushima at this juncture, though it is possible that more end up with cancer due to exposure. However that number will be a tiny fraction of those killed by the Tsunami. There are many legitimate reports available that cover the current dose risk (less than a plane flight) in the area. Remember, the plant did not experience an explosion of the primary RPV's releasing core material into the air like Chernobyl, which lacked containment, but rather a hydrogen explosion within secondary containment, that severely damaged the buildings. The core material from the meltdowns is still somewhere below the RPV's.
There are enough property / land / infrastructure lost that makes future plant construction prohibitively expensive. It is political and psychological instead of technical cost, as you already know the most expensive cost to nuclear plant these days are delays from lawsuits and interest on loans, not the plant's construction.
Quote
Britain and France both currently have large-scale nuclear reactors under construction, as does the United States (Vogtle). There are also reactors being built in India, Finland, Korea, Belarus and Russia. I'm still hoping the current administration reverses that of the previous one so that we can build Darlington B.
For a current list of active nuclear builds, you can check this list:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/inform...on/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx
Note that the table shows the expected grid-connected date, these facilities are all currently under construction.
While the Fukushima incident was tragic, currently, more people have died falling off wind turbines than by that triple meltdown.
Compare to natural gas and hydro they are still too risky and cost too much. I do see the benefits of energy independence (France) being the major reason for nuke, but no one will finance one unless government will take over the cost overrun. Maybe that's why China has no problem building them but not too many in the West.
Quote
So what do you do when it isn't sunny? What do you do when it isn't windy? There are insufficient storage resources to firm either of those sources at any significant penetration. Our 5,000MW fleet of wind turbines often produces C if you lack enough firm capacity? Gas does. When it's -30C still and overcast, what steps in to make up the difference to allow people to heat their homes? Gas does.
The difference between VRE and a turbine isn't a political problem, the difference is that one can provide reliable firm capacity, the other requires all kinds of contortions, accommodations and backups.
1) Spreading the grid across a whole continent. Averaging the load from Alaska to Mexico would really soften the weather, averaging them across 3 timezone and the duck curve will average out. It will cost money but it is going to benefit other energy source as well.
2) Keep the other fossil fuel plant idle with labor managing them as cold spare, yes it cost money but regardless we should do that for redundancy anyways, charge the solar and wind customers for this, I think it is fair.
3) What do you do when gas and coal plants run into problem in hot summer day or power grid went down? You still have this problem and you still have to pay sky high spot market rate. Yes the effect is much lower than solar / wind but the grid still has the issue. If you do 1 and 2 above it will help (higher cost for solar and wind most of the time but consumer avoided blackout and price spikes).
4) What do you do when you only focus on a few local power source and got price gouging? You still need multi-type, multi-vendors for reliability and to avoid gouging.
