this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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I was bullish on nuclear for a while but having looked at how expensive it is to build out I don’t think it really makes much sense anymore
It really depends on the location and situation. With the new generations of reactors they can also do things like seawater desalination with the waste heat alongside power production. You also have situations where the nuclear waste heat is used to heat entire communities far more efficiently than could be done with electricity. There are also many places where solar and wind just aren't practical for various reasons. In those areas nuclear may be a good option for base load power. Nuclear is also still far less environmentally destructive than hydro.
Yes, nuclear power plants are henoiusly expensive and there are definitely areas that they shouldn't be built, but they do still serve a purpose in certain areas. Most of the flack nuclear gets is just because most of our reactor fleet was built durring the cold war. New technologies can acheive far more with nuclear power far more safely and cost effectively than those old reactors.
What about the conversion of coal fired power plants to nuclear ones? I've seen that proposed quite a bit.
Wouldn't only the turbines and cooling tower be reusable? I thought the hard part was the reactor itself.
Even then I don't imagine it would be easy. Anything in a nuclear plant needs to be built to an extremely exacting standard that I'm pretty sure old coal powerplant components wouldn't be. I can't see how you could convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without having to completely rebuild everything.
The problem with reusing coal turbines isn't that they couldn't work, but that you would have to engineer everything backwards from the turbines to the reactor. You COULD do that, but really, you should be engineering to what the current projections for the power needs to be, not the projected power needs from when the coal plant was built.
Maybe reusing the coal plant site makes sense, but only if the coal plant was already taken offline, which to be fair, a lot of plants are being taken offline.
From the little I know it's a pipe dream. Just completely different scales.
Most of the cost is regulatory, and for good reason. I’d like to think that the new small modular reactors will allow us to reduce cost but it’ll take a lot longer than we have available to us.
Two things could remove much of the expense and increase safety:
1- remove lawsuits and NIMBYism to overcome. That's where a lot of the cost and delay comes from when building these, so if millions didn't have to be spent on lawsuits just to get the goahead to begin construction it'd cut the cost massively.
2- remove profit from the equation. Without profit motive, the incentives that encourage discarding safety in favor of profit go way down.