It's fun to imagine an alternate history where the left were more pro-nuclear power.
Like if they'd just built the best power stations rather than the ones that had military crossover.
I mean, if the fossil fuel powered right wing can demonise Elon Musk and Tesla as subsidy junkies, and wind turbines can be accused of giving you ear cancer, can you just imagine what they'd say about nuclear?
What, you think we should building nuclear power like the commies and the French and worse the Democrats? Are you one of those vegetarians? We've got cheap fracked American gas and clean coal, why would we waste taxes on nuclear? Climate change? But CO2 is good, it's plant food for God sake. If anything we want it warmer, so we can get more gas in the artic circle, drill baby drill. Nuclear doesn't have a high enough ERoEI to sustain civilization, you're trying to intentionally destroy capitalism.
> It's fun to imagine an alternate history where the left were more pro-nuclear power.
The thing is, nuclear is not incompatible with “the left”. After all, nuclear programmes make sense only with a lot of public investment and control, and work best in nationalised producers, in which case it provides cheap electricity for the people and revenues for the state. Both the socialists and the communists are in general pro-nuclear.
It’s horse trading to keep the greens in the “gauche plurielle” coalition that closed Superphénix. It’s the same kind of compromises that lead to the arbitrary policy that “we should not have more than 50% of nuclear electricity” and the closing of Fessenheim. Even now, the leftist alliance NUPES cannot really discuss this because the demagogues and greens are against but the other half is pro.
Nuclear inherently should be something the left love.
However the problem is that nuclear power is strongly associated with the cold war and nuclear weapons. It was seen as a way to subsidize nuclear weapons. That never was really true at all.
Also the early environmental movement had a strong 'naturalist' wing (and still does) and nuclear is seen as 'unnatural'. This strongly influenced leftists politics in general.
I would love to learn more about Superphenix and its design, history and the politcs around it but I wasn't able to find much. My French despite 12 years of getting forced to learn it, still sucks.
From a Swiss perspective, its crazy to think a Swiss green politician went and shot the reactor with an RPG.
> I would love to learn more about Superphenix and its design, history and the politcs around it but I wasn't able to find much
Most of my knowledge comes from private discussions with people involved with the project or with the government at the time or from French sources, unfortunately. The best I can find is the English Wikipedia page, which seems decently accurate although short on technical details (a lot of them remain more or less industrial secrets to this day: there hasn’t been a bigger breeder reactor before or since).
In the long run, sodium-cooled reactors are a dead end because of the risks associated with a sodium loop (which is terrifying). But a fast reactor would have been invaluable as a test environment for advanced materials and composites, and improved fuels.
> From a Swiss perspective, its crazy to think a Swiss green politician went and shot the reactor with an RPG.
Indeed. So much for neutrality! To be fair, that should seem crazy to anybody from any country.
Yeah, sodium is an somewhat unfortunate branch of the technology. It was sort of picked by many nations as a next set, put it had a number of drawbacks. Still, I would have preferred more of those to more PWRs.
I would like to know how cooling intensive it was compare to PWR. And what operating temperature.
Also, some of the Sodium reactor technology and materials is now used by companies like Moltex Energy.
Molten Salt reactors are the likely future in my opinion, but not sure yet what form.
> It was sort of picked by many nations as a next set, put it had a number of drawbacks.
It made a lot of sense. Sodium is an amazing coolant. It was also a relatively easy to implement design for a breeder reactor, with all the related advantages (much better way of using uranium fuel with no enrichment step, burning of plutonium and high-activity "waste", etc).
> I would like to know how cooling intensive it was compare to PWR. And what operating temperature.
Cooling should be overall similar to a PWR operating at the same power. The temperature in the core is higher than in PWRs (around 500 to 600°C instead of 300°C), but they have 3 cooling loops instead of 2. I can't remember the temperature in the most external loops off the top of my head but I don't expect them to be very different in both designs. They use similar steam turbines, so they should have similar operating regimes, but I could be wrong.
> Also, some of the Sodium reactor technology and materials is now used by companies like Moltex Energy.
Yes, the materials are quite different from PWRs because of the different neutron fluxes and spectra, but some of this knowledge can be applied to other fast reactor designs like the fast MSRs. Some of the corrosion mechanisms (which are a large hurdle to clear for MSRs still) also have some similarities.
> Molten Salt reactors are the likely future in my opinion, but not sure yet what form.
That is where the wind is blowing. It's difficult to say more at the moment, because there are very different designs (fast or thermal, uranium, thorium, or MOX, large or small and modular, etc), but there is a lot of activity around MSRs.
Like if they'd just built the best power stations rather than the ones that had military crossover.
I mean, if the fossil fuel powered right wing can demonise Elon Musk and Tesla as subsidy junkies, and wind turbines can be accused of giving you ear cancer, can you just imagine what they'd say about nuclear?
What, you think we should building nuclear power like the commies and the French and worse the Democrats? Are you one of those vegetarians? We've got cheap fracked American gas and clean coal, why would we waste taxes on nuclear? Climate change? But CO2 is good, it's plant food for God sake. If anything we want it warmer, so we can get more gas in the artic circle, drill baby drill. Nuclear doesn't have a high enough ERoEI to sustain civilization, you're trying to intentionally destroy capitalism.