At the time, the world, Germany included, was well underway to re-embrace nuclear power, to reduce CO2 emission and all that.
And then Fukushima happened.
Jeroen Belleman
Although tsunamis and powerful earthquakes are very much less common in Germany they do have quite a hefty and influential green movement.
Ironically because of nuclear shutdowns they are now burning vast quantities of dirty lignite in inefficient former East German power plants to make the bulk of their electricity and despoiling the countryside with ugly open cast lignite/brown coal mines.
France is the only country with serious investment in nuclear power now. They have nearly 75% nuclear generation and export it to other EU countries.
The British nuclear plant is all ageing and being run past its design lifetime with new reactors still in a very precarious part built state. (precarious as in it isn't clear if they will ever get finished or not)
-- Regards, Martin Brown
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** Does anyone here not realise that "global warming" is merely a conspiracy theory promoted by the Nuclear Power industry in order to deal themselves back in the game ?Always consider the principle behind " cui bono ".
Nuclear engineers well know they hold the *trump card* when it come to supplying the human race with copious amounts of CO2 free energy way into the future.
... Phil
Yes, and their investment in nuclear is getting much more serious as the co st and construction time of nuclear plants is increasing astronomically. W e've had the discussion already of the two most recent French designs for n ukes have overrun to the point they are several multiples of the original c ost estimates and the construction time has ballooned out by a factor of 5 or more. I don't recall the exact numbers but they are so bad, pretty much no one in their right mind will build similar plants until something drast ic changes to make the economically feasible again.
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Nearly all nukes end up being run past their design lifetimes. They have a lways intended that. Design to 30 or 40 years and renew the operating cert ificates to run another 30 or 40 years once you see how much deterioration has happened and what it takes to fix.
-- Rick C. - Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging - Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Yes, exactly.
-- Rick C. + Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging + Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Depends on how you define 'serious investment". Sure, France has nuclear contributing the highest percentage, but I would not call that the only metric. China currently has the most nukes under development and while France gets 70% of their power from nukes, there are other countries that generate 40 to 50%. And the US generates more than twice the output of France. There are over 50 new nukes under construction around the world.
Where you get the water to cool reactors from is a problem in many areas of the world. 40% of France's fresh water reserves go to cooling their reactors before anyone else gets it.
A problem with fission power and why you can't build 'em fast among other reasons is every plant is different and has to be engineered to its particular location and environmental circumstances because of the coolant constraints. Fossil fuel plants are more "modular" and solar even more so.
You can build fossil fuel-fired power plants and wind farms and solar farms in all sorts of sizes from small to huge depending on environmental constraints. Water-cooled fission plants are only financially viable to build in one size, huge, so they have to be hand-crafted each time with respect to where they are.
How does the nuclear industry pay off all the climate scientists who manufacture "global warming propaganda" for them and ensure their silence forever, though?
Build the rectors on the cost, so there is plenty of cooling water.
The reason for constantly increasing reactor sizes is mainly political. It is very hard to get a license to build a new reactor, so for a specific amount of red tape, build as big as possible.
The other is the NIMBY effect, so it is very hard to start a new nuclear site. In practice, you can only build new reactors on old nuclear sites, in which a large part of the population work with the old reactors.
There has been a lot of plans building small modular reactors. However, the only standardized built I know of is the two KLT-40S nuclear icebreaker reactors built on the Akademik Lomonosov barge. The barge was just recently towed to Pevek in Northern Siberia and should start to generate power and district heat for the local community at the end of this year.
One can see it as that the public are all scardey-pants terrified of things they don't understand, or that the public has a more accurate assessment of the risks than the profit-driven nuclear industry, who despite the public actually giving them numerous chances to prove them wrong seems to manage to f*ck things up with regularity and scare the crap out of them once again every decade or two.
like at a basic level the public might expect the nuclear power industry to not have a long history of repeated safety standard violations and maintenance problems and pretty good track record of hiring a fair number of drunks and morons to run the plants day-to-day.
The nuclear industry hasn't met the basic competence tests yet
Folks whose other alternative is freezing in the dark (in a Siberian Arctic winter, no less) tend to be more realistic about these things. ;)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 http://electrooptical.net http://hobbs-eo.com
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The US Army built some small reactors. One was at Ft. Greely Alaska. It had no cooling towers. The cooling water was pumped back into the ground near the base's drinking water wells. It was shut down just before I arrived, bu t they had continued to operate it for over a year with leaking pipes in th e heat exchangers, so they were heating the buildings with radioactive stea m, ans well as using it in the base laundry. They are just now working on p lans to dismantle the site, after over 45 years. There are reports of highe r than normal cases of Thyroid cancer among the soldiers and family memebrs who were stationed there from the mid '70s, onward.
Oh, I get it! It's a purity test. Automobile drivers kill forty thousand folk a year, nuclear industry hovers around the same accident rate as other industries, but 'standard violations' are all carefully documented and the documents trotted out for occasional display.
In Iran, papers from the US embassy are occasionally waved at a camera, accompanied by accusations of collusion/espionage/impure-thinking.
Noone ever passes a purity test, or is found 'not guilty' in a kangaroo court. The public only ought to apply judgement when empaneled into a jury and given a thorough look at facts, and there's a good reason for that.
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That's a pretty fair assessment. The thing is we have tried our hardest to not have any accidents and yet in the 50 years we've been using nuclear po wer it has had a few serious problems, none of which should have happened. I think I've run the numbers here before. When the lifetime of the plants and the quantity are accounted for, the risk of another accident is not tr ivial. It may not be 50-50, but it is worse than 1 in 100 even.
The worst, however, is yet to come as the plants age and even more so, the waste fuel mounts up. We just don't have any viable plant to store the was te long enough to assure it won't be a problem.
It's interesting that nukes provide "district heat" in some countries. You have to be close to do that and here I believe most nukes are not close to even small towns. Three mile island was on a... well, island! North Anna is nearest to Mineral, VA which has a population of maybe a few hundred wh ile the county seat is a few thousand population and is some 10 miles away.
-- Rick C. +- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging +- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
Yeah people in the biz tend to take the same persecuted-egomaniac attitude when peasants object to allowing the for-profit nuclear industry total control over determining whether they live or die today; it doesn't do a thing to re-enforce any confidence among the peasants that biz-people actually know what they're doing.
there's no money in fission power generation and never was without heavy government support and subsidization (like a bunch of other industries you could mention.)
As a free-market enterprise where it didn't have the luxury of shoving most its liabilities onto other people trying to stand on its own merits it falls down bad.
If there had ever been huge billions of easy dollars to be made off the biz with no greater intrinsic risk to investors and the financial sector than a gas-fired plant no amount of regulation or environmental-lobbying (with the $5 they have available to spend on lobbying) could have ever stopped them from springing up like weeds.
Just a high-risk money pit of an industry that could never really deliver the goods and now finds it convenient to blame the dirty hippies for their failures as usual.
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Of course, not all their nuclear reactors are working
at one point twenty of them were shut down because steel castings inside th e reactor turned out to be defective.
Trader4's source - a nuclear industry trade association - doesn't talk abou t this.
Trder4's nuclear trade association lists fifty as "under construction". The examples in the US and the UK all seem to be way behind schedule and way o ver budget, and likely to be cancelled, but that's not the kind of informat ion a trade association puts out.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Yeah they never even figured out good answers to some of the basic engineering problems of the tech before they set about running the ball with it.
among other things that alone doesn't do much to convince the hoi polloi that the nuke industry doesn't actually run on hubris vs. uranium.
Not uncommon for many types of power plants to have cooling towers, and for nuclear plants built prior to the late 60s or early 70s to not have them, e.g.:
cooling towers were the filthy green's fault!
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