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Would nuclear reactors be feasible everywhere?
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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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.
How much do you know about Three Mile Island? Fukushima was built in a stupid location, so lets not do that again. But Three Mile Island is often way over blown.
It's public perception that is important here. That's where the impact of Chernobyl is for building new plants. Public perception of the other events furthers doubts about the safety. It's also easy to have hindsight about Fukushima, but it was built nonetheless.
With Three Mile Island everything that could go wrong did and it still wound up being an overblown non-issue. There have been exactly 0 environmental or health impacts due to Three Mile Island despite it being the worst nuclear disaster in US history.
Fukushima was built in a stupid location. How about we don't build nuclear power plants on fault lines in tsunami prone areas. Literally 4 different fault lines converge on Japan, it is not a place anyone should be building nuclear power plants.
A word with what? Great examples of safe and effective design that kept all the fuel in the containment vessel?
Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown with no release of isotopes or actinides. Could it have been better, for sure, and the decommissioning and clean up had their own issues but in a single day the amount of toxic chemicals and radioactive dust given off in a single coal burner is greater than ALL the radiation released at TMI. If we are going to cite it as an example of failure or harm its only fair to show comparable harm for other currently subsidized forms of energy that are uncounted when it comes to their full harm outside of just global warming gasses.
Fukushima was another great example of how safe nuclear can be when properly regulated. When the quake hit all of the online reactors went into shutdown stopping the reactors. The flaw at Fukushima was in emergency power and cooling as well as management. The backup cooling pumps were below the sea wall and in the basements of the buildings so they flooded. With the pumps flooded they could not keep the fuel in the reactors cool. Fukushima also had warnings that the sea wall was not sufficient to protect the facility. They ignored the warnings and did not raise the walls and as such the reactors ended up melting down but remained within the containment buildings. The explosions at Fukushima were related to hydrogen and were not related to reactors going prompt critical. The sister facility to Fukushima had higher walls, pumps above the reactors, and better management who used on-site materials to extend power to the facilities to keep the pumps running after they lost local power. https://hbr.org/2014/07/how-the-other-fukushima-plant-survived
So yeah outside of Chernobyl and some early test reactors, Nuclear has been shown to be the safest and least polluting form of power generation in history.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0832/ML083260701.pdf https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.202.4372.1045
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
Yes and no. Renewables are the best, but they're inconsistent.
The environmental impact of coal is much worse than nuclear, so nuclear is a good consistent baseline power to be supplemented by renewable generation.
The base load argument doesn't hold water any more - not when there are places which are progressing towards being totally free of base load. Eg. South Australia is already nearly all renewable power with in-fill from batteries and transient gas power when needed. They're still currently getting some base load from other states but it's small and gradually being phased out.