encelado748

The main problem is that in europe there is no single regulatory body for the certification of nuclear reactor. That means that a nuclear reactor certified for france needs to be certified again for UK, Poland or Czechia. The requirements for nuclear are much higher then a solar power plant. Each single material and part needs to be certified and the entire production is tracked (material traceability, QA testing, chain of custody). A valve in a nuclear power plant cost 100 times more then the same valve in a coal plant. There are very few companies that deal with this level of paperwork required, this means often you need to create new production lines. Regulation in nuclear is not outcome oriented, but process oriented. So you do not have incentive to make everything more efficient: you do not care about the end result, you care about every single steps in the process. This make everything much longer and expensive. Post Fukushima raised a lot the cost of all design made before as new requirements caused to modify previous plants. This is one of the main reasons for the delay in nuclear deploy in the last 20 years.

cheap uranium can be bought from Canada and Kazakhstan. In Europe there are big reserves in Ukraine. But uranium can also be extracted from water. Getting uranium from the ocean is 3 to 5 times more expensive. But uranium is a minimal part of the cost of nuclear energy. So if we get uranium from the ocean, energy price will raise by 10% to 15%. On fossil fuel power plant the actual fuel is most of the cost of the energy. Furthermore you can buy uranium years in advance, making it much easier to prevent jump in market prices.

In the current European legislative environment yes. We lack common certification rules, standardized procurement and security standards that make sense. Nuclear in Europe is double the time to build and double the cost of nuclear in Japan. This was not always the case. France was able to decarbonized faster than any other big country in the world thanks to the rapid deployment of his fleet. If we fix that, new nuclear in Europe makes sense. We currently lack the technology and the industrial capacity to not be dependent on China for solar, wind and batteries. Nuclear provide energy when you need it, stabilize the grid and ultimately reduce the price of energy (like you see in Finland). The higher the share of renewable in the European grid, the higher the amount of batteries needed. In general one could argue that the best grid mix for lowering external dependencies and costs is 10% to 20% nuclear, and the rest hydro, solar, wind and batteries. In the north of Europe wind is a great resource, but in the most industrialized part of the south (Italian padana plain) the wind potential is very low, as the solar potential in winter when the fog would cover everything. The amount of connections to make a renewable only grid work on the European level are not trivial nor cheap, and we should do anything we can to promote and regulatory environment where the best tool for the job can be deployed.

Was referring no to this recent article cited in the cross posted thread: https://feddit.org/post/27922091

People do not want to ear this, but depending on your definition of clean, nuclear is as clean as solar, wind and batteries. No source of energy is free from death, carbon emissions and pollution. Solar, wind and batteries requires extensive mining for rare materials and carbon intensive factory production. If we check all factors again nuclear, the number are remarkably similar to solar, wind and batteries.

In a world where gas, oil and coal exists, nuclear must be put on the same category as renewable. We cannot afford to close any nuclear power plant, as closing a nuclear power plant before the last coal power plant is closed, means we are killing people. Numbers do not lie.

2.2% of Fukushima prefecture is nothing compared with the damage that fossil fuel is doing every single year to the entire planet. Even ignoring climate change, we are breathing pollution that is killing us. Radiation is a natural thing all around us, and our body evolved to correct for that below a certain threshold. Closing nuclear in germany before closing carbon killed a lot of people. If nuclear displace carbon I am more then happy with nuclear

Not to be pedantic, but Wikipedia shows US$7.5 billion for the entire plan that means 3.75 billion for each reactor that is more or less in line with what stated above. Still, 7.5 is much cheaper then 35.

I am a nuclear fanboy, because it is a clean and safe form of energy. But the EPR costs and building time are a tragedy for the entire sector and I have no problem in admitting that. But there are good third generation reactor like the hitachi abwr that are fast to build (less the 48 months) and relatively cheap (less than 5 billions).

The real problem is the amount of safety changes required to gen3 design after Fukushima (that was a gen2 reactor that suffered the worst earthquake and tsunami ever in the history of Japan and caused maybe a 1 single death after 4 years, just to put things in prospective).

But this is a problem in general for European nuclear. An APR-1400 costs 4.5 billion in Korea and 9 billions in Europe.

The CCP can explode a nuclear bomb in Beijing also, but why should they?

A well maintained power plant is a resource and the maintenance cost less than building a new power plant. And if the power plant lack maintenance it will stop working and that's it.

If you perfectly and simultaneously clog all eight primary injection pipes (a statistically impossibility, must be elaborate and deliberate sabotage) the reactor will meltdown, and the corium will sit at the bottom of the containment dome where natural air circulation will reduce the temperature with all the radiation trapped inside.

I trust an AP1000 in China more then an older reactor in France. Your critique is based on fantasy. No dictatorship can decree that physics stop working.

Just because is China that does not make it unsafe.

CAP1000 is an incredibly safe 3+ generation design that uses multiple redundant passive safety system. A reactor like that can cool itself without electricity nor human intervention.

The comparison with Chernobyl is laughable. That design had a lot of flaws that do not exists in modern reactors. Just so you know there are still 7 reactor like Chernobyl running in Russia. I would worry more about those instead of one of the safest industrial facility ever designed by humankind.

I really do not get what you mean with that. What is the relationship with my comment? What are you trying to say?

So given it is possible to create a nuclear power plant in 6 years (China did it, France did it), we just need to understand what needs to be done to make it possible again. And the answer is economy of scale (build more then one at a time) and streamlined bureaucracy (unify component requirement and simplify certification procedures).

The problem is nobody want to invest in the effort to make these changes against misinformed public opposition and fossil fuel lobbies.