The residents of Prypiat and half of central and eastern Europe would like to disagree.
3. Meltdowns never happen now as long as correct measures are made.
Well, system failure compounded with human operator error gets you at worst Chernobyl, at best Three Mile Island. And in an emergency, human error is very easy to worm its way in. Also, since most of these things are built and staffed by people well trained and fully aware of what'll happen if they screw up, statistically, the likelihood of catastrophic failure per operating hour is negligible, especially because we've seen what happens when one of these things blows up. Which is why protests against building nuclear power plants are silly.
But on the other hand, if one will go off, it'll leave a mark.
Hell, even assuming everything goes as intended, you're still either stuck importing the fuel, or having all sorts of worried people nosing around in your strategic affairs if you start enriching nuclear fuel on your own.
As for costs, it is, indeed, the initial investment that's the primary deterrent. Over here, with what we've been giving the Russian fuel companies in profit for heating alone ever since the USSR collapsed we could've had that reactor built six times over.
My point is, as PanH so well explained, that it's naive to lob nuclear power (or most any one project) as a panacea for energy problems.
Actually most fourth generators can't melt down. All thorium based reactor, and a significant part of the breeder reactors are completely safe*. Worst thing that can happen is a complete failure of the cooling system. (Which has to be one hell of a failure, considering most modern reactor designs have gravity based cooling) At that point, the core will heat up, and maybe some radioactive steam can escape, but thanks to the fact that thorium has a much higher melting point than uranium, or because of the special design of the nuclear fuel pellets. The core can't overheat. The reaction simply isn't capable of reaching the needed temperature.
Sadly, most nuclear power plants are still of the second generation (Almost all failures are in second generation plants). Speaking of which, did Fukushima do so much damage? Seems to me that any oil tankers/ drill site failures were much, much worse. After all, the coal industry releases more radioactivity in the environement in a year than all nuclear disasters and leakages put together over the entire lifetime on nuclear engineering, and radiation isn't that dangerous once sufficiently dilluted.
Also, the reason that France's reactors were so cheap is that unlikely as in the US, where the reactors are all custom build, these were mass produced. Meaning that all reactors share the same design, which also easily allows for transfer of personnel and parts between facilities.
*Take that with a grain of salt of course.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9774926 times)