In reality A SINGLE overdue French reactor could wipe out a whole country (Luxembourg) leaving us with a nuclear wasteland right in the middle of Europe. A beautiful picture you can't draw with numbers. To make my point even clearer and because I have the feeling like I'm talking to Americans who have never even took a look at an European map. This is it: https://i.imgur.com/SVom3rl.jpg Yes, there are people all over the place.
This stuff is being kept alive for political reasons (hey here is your favourite reason for nuclear "mistakes": human error again) while it rots from within. So how it may be surprising that people do not trust the energy and those who are responsible for it politically and technically, is beyond me.
All that money wasted for this technology could have been invested into renewables which would have brought us much farther than we are today but it didn't happen because: hey nuclear lobby. Throwing even more money on it now is beyond stupid (https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...) and I really hope the lobby money for this artificially kept alive propaganda train finally runs out just like the technology did.
The only INES 7 disaster in the last 30 years involved Fukushima being hit by an earthquake that was out of design spec and then a literal 14 meter high tsunami. I think it was something like a 1 in 600 year event. Even then they had to be negligent on their safety standards for it to cause a bad meltdown.
That was what it took to fail a 1970s designed (pre-Chernobyl, pre-computer-aided-design) nuclear reactor with upgrades. Standards haven't gotten lower since then. Luxembourg will be fine. Don't panic.
Unless they migrate to the coast with global warming. Which can be mitigated by more nuclear use!
> I think it was something like a 1 in 600 year event.
Nice how those numbers worked out eh? It looks so good on paper almost like "we're safe for 600 years" but we weren't. IT HAPPENED. So how about the chances for that reactor near Luxembourg and some satellite falling on it or something like that? What is the big number for that and how much will it be worth if it happens to the people there losing their country when it happens again?
Yeah global warming can be mitigated by technologies which have astronomically higher numbers you can wave around because nobody gives a damn if a satellite falls on a field of solar collectors. No technician has to sleep in a wind turbine because of some pandemic virus.
Face it: nuclear is dead. It's a energy source from the last century.
It was hit by tsunami because it was built in a tsunami-prone, seismically vulnerable area. A "1 in 1000 year" tsunami hitting it in first 40 years of operation sounds like a planning and engineering failure, and is why people tend to be super sceptical about safe nuclear.
How many nuclear plants are there in the world? About 500 [0]. Years between Chernobyl and Fukushima? ~30.
I expect a 1 in 1500 year event to have happened to a nuclear reactor somewhere in the world in that time.
People are skeptical because they don't have a very good grasp of statistics. I may have mentioned something about that a few posts up. Somewhere in the world something is going horribly wrong. The world is a big place.
That being said; I think there were design decisions made around Fukushima. The engineers in the 70s didn't have the capabilities we enjoy now.
Nuclear power today is about 10% of overall power generation. Were it 100%, INES 7 catastrophes would be happening every 3 years. That's before you account for wars and low safety culture plaguing significant part of the world which does not operate nuclear currently.
Engineering in 1970s was overall solid and not that much behind on material science and control systems theory than today: they could get people to the Moon and back after all. Dismissing the catastrophes to that is a dangerous hubris.
> Nuclear power today is about 10% of overall power generation. Were it 100%, INES 7 catastrophes would be happening every 3 years.
Well, no. It would probably be 0 INES 7 catastrophes because none of the new reactors would be built using pre-1980s designs.
> Engineering in 1970s was overall solid...
There is no comparison between modern engineering and 1970s engineering. Was 1970s engineering good? Yes. That is your clue at how jaw-dropping modern engineering is in terms of capabilities.
There would be fewer old failure modes in new reactor designs. There would be other failure modes (some unknown at design stage) in the new designs. Concentrated energy gradient in nuclear power generation suggests any claim of inherent safety is wishful thinking.
> There is no comparison between modern engineering and 1970s engineering.
There absolutely is, and tech people simply don't appreciate how slow the pace of progress was outside semiconductors. Outside the CAD based process flow the differences in mechanical and civil engineering to what they were are minimal. There are hardly any materials (outside of some niche exotics like PEEK) used today that were unknown in 1970s.
I'm a mining engineer. I assure you that there is no comparison between modern and 1970s capabilities. The discipline lives right next to civil engineering. Nothing to do with semiconductors.
I like how you wrote "solves that" when the product is not there, never was and probably never will be. Your article was from 2011 and the company which should have made this thing real now invests in:
Ocean thermal energy conversion and Floating wind turbines
It's where the subsidies are, flexblue took a hit from Fukushima as did other efforst but the concept does resolve the issue of availability of land and addresses a lot of cost issues via serial factory production.
Rn the most promising efforts to watch concept wise IMO are nuscale and russia/china's floating concepts.
In reality A SINGLE overdue French reactor could wipe out a whole country (Luxembourg) leaving us with a nuclear wasteland right in the middle of Europe. A beautiful picture you can't draw with numbers. To make my point even clearer and because I have the feeling like I'm talking to Americans who have never even took a look at an European map. This is it: https://i.imgur.com/SVom3rl.jpg Yes, there are people all over the place.
This stuff is being kept alive for political reasons (hey here is your favourite reason for nuclear "mistakes": human error again) while it rots from within. So how it may be surprising that people do not trust the energy and those who are responsible for it politically and technically, is beyond me.
All that money wasted for this technology could have been invested into renewables which would have brought us much farther than we are today but it didn't happen because: hey nuclear lobby. Throwing even more money on it now is beyond stupid (https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...) and I really hope the lobby money for this artificially kept alive propaganda train finally runs out just like the technology did.