Submitted 6 months ago by hulemy@ani.social to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
Seeing that they need quite a lot of clean water, which is not widely available everywhere during the entire year in big amounts, especially with these droughts due to climate change.
Nuclear is feasible in lots of places if the question is, “given enough money can we build a nuclear plant here?”
Nuclear gets much less feasible if the question is, “how do we generate electricity in the most cost effective way we can?”
Yeah, let’s not add a financial incentive to cut corners on the nuclear reactor.
I wouldn’t worry too much about water availability for cooling (even though it’s an issue). I see a bigger “political” issue
A safe nuclear industry requires at laest the two following stuff
A solid academic and industrial tradition, able to train skilled engineer and technician, but also researcher to prepare the future.
A government strong enough to deal with the NIMBY, but weak enough to have an independent nuclear safety agency able to perform audits without caring about political pressure.
This works in a country like France, may still work in a country like Germany or US (even though NIMBY have more power there) but many country especially in the * third world* don’t have either trained “nuclear scientists” or a government able to guarantee nuclear safety
We can deal with NIMBY in certain situations, we (US) do have eminent domain laws where the govt is legally allowed to take your stuff, write you a check for an amount that should cover it, and wave you on your way.
We use it to build highways and stuff.
Nuclear is much harder, admittedly.
What do you define as nuclear power? Because something like Pioneer 10 which is in space since 1972, is using a nuclear reactor to provide its power, and it is still working.
yep. a lot of variance in different configurations of radioisotope thermoelectric generators - anywhere between a few watts to 5kW if they’re designed to be modular. TEG’s are crazy efficient, they just sit there & decay, producing power.
Most power generation methods like coal have similar requirements, and it doesn’t have to be clean water. In costal areas, seawater can be used just fine.
Can this be an effective method of desalinization?
If seawater is used, couldn’t the steam be captured for fresh water?
You use seawater for cooling the systems. You could use excess power to run desalination plants, but not use the reactor directly.
They’re not economically feasible anywhere right now. Unfortunately nuclear power is very expensive compared to all the alternatives. Unless there’s some radical breakthrough I can’t see much nuclear being built in the future. No company would pay such a huge up-front cost to produce uneconomic electricity.
So the strict answer is - no, they’re not feasible everywhere. And also not feasible pretty much anywhere.
If anyone bothered to include externalities, nuclear is more than competitive. And a ton of the costs are purely regulatory. Sadly, the incompetence of the Soviets ruined nuclear power and likely doomed the planet.
Three Mile Island and Fukushima would like a word.
The largest hurdles to nuclear power are PR. Water usage of nuclear plants is able to recycle most if not all of what they utilize and the high energy density and capable power output makes it much more economical to pump water from further away to sustain the plant and needs of regional communities, especially compared to fossil fuels plants that largely use water in the same capacity as nuclear. If a coal or gas plant was viable in a location, then nuclear would be just as if not more capable in that location.
You could replace every coal plant in the world with nuclear and the only major logistics disruption would be supplying them with enough uranium.
Slightly off topic, there are about 450 nuclear plants on earth. A noted MIT study in 1989 estimated that each nuclear plant only has a worst case nuclear accident every 20000 years.
Statistically that would make one every 44 years.
In our history we have had nuclear power plants for about 60 years, and so far there were three worst case nuclear accidents.
Yeah, but those worst case nuclear accidents have nothing on coal in terms of a death count. They sound scary, but overall don’t come even close to it.
True but the fallout for each accident is immense. Western Europe dealt with Tschernobyl for years. Japan was just lucky that the wind blew in the other direction.
If the world triples nuclear power plants, and we deal with an accident every 7-10 years, that’s gonna be a serious problem.
In 2023 the alternative is not nuclear vs coal, but nuclear vs wind and solar.
That 3 in 60 is pretty loaded since Chernobyl simply would not have been possible with western reactors of the same design year, to say nothing of what passed as modern than and even more so now.
It would also not have been possible with their design, if all the failguards wouldn’t have failed.
But 2 in 60 years, both of western design, is still more than that study estimated.
What study is that? Can you give a reference?
Nowhere where humans are in control. Humans make mistakes.
No shit.
The solution there is that ideally no human is allowed to make a mistake significant enough to have any impact.
If Bob the nuclear engineer does something fucking stupid, but there’s an automated failsafe that resolves the problem… was there really that big of a problem?
This issue is… that stuff gets expensive quick.
If Bob the nuclear engineer does something fucking stupid, but there’s an automated failsafe that resolves the problem… was there really that big of a problem?
Sure. The idea is plausible. They have tried such strategies, and improved them for several decades, and they seriously believed that all would be good enough. But Chernobyl and Fukushima have taught us that it is not possible to do it without super terrible accidents that cost simply too much (money, lives, health etc). So, we know now that mankind is not able.
Like burning coal which releases uncontrolled and unmeasured quantities of radiation and heavy metals like Mercury.
burning of coal are environmentally and biologically toxic elements, such as lead, mercury, nickel, tin, cadmium, antimony, and arsenic, as well as radio isotopes of thorium and strontium.
For the foreseeable future, nuclear would work fine. As long as there isn’t corrosive compounds the water works fine, and there is enough uranium alone to power nuclear plants for the next 2000 years
Wait, only 2000 years? As in this is how much we’ve mined or is this how much is available to mine? And is that assuming we maintain our current level of consumption? 2000 years feels way too short for something that all of humanity relies on.
Considering how long we’ve had nuclear power and how short a time electricity has widely been in use, 2000 years is a crazy long time. Given how quickly we’ve developed power generation technology, it’s highly likely that we adopt other technologies like solar, wind, and hopefully fusion reactors long before we run out of uranium.
Wouldn’t want them anywhere that is prone to earthquakes - the entire Pacific rim, for example.
They can be built to deal with things like earthquakes. The catch is the cost goes up. Nuclear is already an expensive option, so that can get prohibitive.
CherenkovBlue@iusearchlinux.fyi 6 months ago
You need water to generate steam to turn a turbine and make electricity (same for coal, natural gas, fusion). However, many advanced reactor designs do not use water for the reactor coolant itself, unlike light water reactors that do. They use gas, molten salt, or liquid metals. As a result, you can get to quite high temperatures useful for process heat, such as hydrogen production. Direct desalination might also be doable, the issue/question being on the design of the non-nuclear side of the plant.
A lot of Gen IV designs are in the process of commercialization now, with demonstrations slated for later this decade.