this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
958 points (97.5% liked)
WTF
779 readers
1 users here now
The average c/WTF enjoyer
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.