Half the reason it ends up so expensive is because no one has experience building them, and so they always end up over budget when they do get made (at least in the US)
And the danger is vastly overblown. Far more have died as the results of accidents in other power industries then as a result of nuclear. It’s very safe when properly regulated (and not run by clowns aka Chernobyl)
Chernobyl was disastrous because design flaws were not relayed to the plant engineers. It took years of roadblocked research to find out what had happened. Even the man that had helped to design the RBMK reactor did not consider a meltdown was possible because the xenon that ended up poisoning the reactor would burn off under normal circumstances.
The meltdown could have been prevented if not for the soviet government inexplicably withholding critical information about the reactor from it’s own engineers.
Chernobyl also had known design defects the Soviets chose to ignore because they couldn’t admit their precious atomic program was even capable of having a flaw.
And even with those defects, it required a very specific and normally unlikely sequence of events and multiple warnings being ignored before the core melted down.
Back in the 60s airliners crashed far more frequently per passenger mile.
So clearly airliners would never go anywhere.
The problem is the financing, the plants are so expensive they try to wring infinitely money out of old designs, which makes new designs harder to build because the old designs need so much regulation to be safe.
We need to start rolling out 4th Gen reactors like an assembly line, reactors designed to fail safe with almost no risk of release events.
Compare the shitty PWR, or God forbid the RBMK design to a modern PBR, which, if power goes out just fizzles as the water moderator boils off.
The left is so absolutely religious about nuclear power (because of weapons BTW, a fair reason, but it’s being exploited), while the right hate it becausw they own all the fossil fuels.
Don’t forget the more than 200 nuclear powered ships currently puttering their way around the world, both above and below the surface. Not to mention the numerous research and testing reactors that don’t product grid energy.
And that doesn’t even get into things like RTGs used on spacecraft and in extremely remote regions where traditional fuels would be nearly impossible to transport reliably. Not technically a reactor in the traditional sense of what people think of as a reactor there, but nuclear energy all the same. The USSR built more than 1,500 of those alone while they were around.
And even ignoring all of those, alternative reactor designs like Thorium molten salt reactors can’t meltdown if cooling systems fail, because the fuel used doesn’t generate heat requiring constant cooling like that.
The only reason most designs we have in use now are uranium based is because that can be used to create weapons, so that’s where the research went… alternatives like Thorium can’t, despite the fuel being much more abundant.
Half the reason it ends up so expensive is because no one has experience building them, and so they always end up over budget when they do get made (at least in the US)
And the danger is vastly overblown. Far more have died as the results of accidents in other power industries then as a result of nuclear. It’s very safe when properly regulated (and not run by clowns aka Chernobyl)
Chernobyl was disastrous because design flaws were not relayed to the plant engineers. It took years of roadblocked research to find out what had happened. Even the man that had helped to design the RBMK reactor did not consider a meltdown was possible because the xenon that ended up poisoning the reactor would burn off under normal circumstances.
The meltdown could have been prevented if not for the soviet government inexplicably withholding critical information about the reactor from it’s own engineers.
Chernobyl also had known design defects the Soviets chose to ignore because they couldn’t admit their precious atomic program was even capable of having a flaw.
And even with those defects, it required a very specific and normally unlikely sequence of events and multiple warnings being ignored before the core melted down.
The are about 450 nuclear power plants in operation. The number of plants built did not come up in my searches, but let’s say it was double that.
There were three full and two partial meltdowns in nuclear power plants.
That leaves us with a 0.5% chance of a meltdown per reactor.
I know the calculation is extremely simplified, but the risk is still too high for me.
There are a lot of airliners flying around.
Back in the 60s airliners crashed far more frequently per passenger mile.
So clearly airliners would never go anywhere.
The problem is the financing, the plants are so expensive they try to wring infinitely money out of old designs, which makes new designs harder to build because the old designs need so much regulation to be safe.
We need to start rolling out 4th Gen reactors like an assembly line, reactors designed to fail safe with almost no risk of release events.
Compare the shitty PWR, or God forbid the RBMK design to a modern PBR, which, if power goes out just fizzles as the water moderator boils off.
The left is so absolutely religious about nuclear power (because of weapons BTW, a fair reason, but it’s being exploited), while the right hate it becausw they own all the fossil fuels.
That’s not how statistics work. Meltdowns are not random events.
Don’t forget the more than 200 nuclear powered ships currently puttering their way around the world, both above and below the surface. Not to mention the numerous research and testing reactors that don’t product grid energy.
And that doesn’t even get into things like RTGs used on spacecraft and in extremely remote regions where traditional fuels would be nearly impossible to transport reliably. Not technically a reactor in the traditional sense of what people think of as a reactor there, but nuclear energy all the same. The USSR built more than 1,500 of those alone while they were around.
And even ignoring all of those, alternative reactor designs like Thorium molten salt reactors can’t meltdown if cooling systems fail, because the fuel used doesn’t generate heat requiring constant cooling like that.
The only reason most designs we have in use now are uranium based is because that can be used to create weapons, so that’s where the research went… alternatives like Thorium can’t, despite the fuel being much more abundant.