Britain has gone two months without burning coal to generate power

Post by jjoonathan » Mon, Jun 15, 2020, 6:43 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #294

jjoonathan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cleaner nuclear If we (USA) hadn't stopped building nuclear in the 80s, and had merely continued building it at the same pace, our grid would be (approximately) carbon-free today. Not twenty years from now, not fifty years from now, today. But no, we collectively decided that no amount of engineering could possibly make nuclear acceptably safe, and we made the grown-up responsible decision to pump our atmosphere fu…

The reason we stopped building nuclear power palnts is that growth in energy demand suddenly slowed or stopped, nuclear power plants turned out to be more expensive than promoted, and because of a 1978 law called PURPA that opened up the grid to non-utility generators.

Post by aksss » Fri, Jun 19, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

Ma8ee wrote: post #288

aksss wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't kept up on it, but aren't travelling wave reactors supposed to use the spent rods from light water reactors?[0] Seems like an elegant use of nuclear waste. There was an argument made last year [1] that the problem with nuclear power generation is that everything we have in production is 50+ yo technology. Modern reactors are far cleaner, far safer, but the political hurdles for regulatory approval and NIMBY…

There are always a lot of interesting research projects brought up about what to do with the nuclear waste in the future. But never anything cost effective actually in production yet, and it's not like they haven't hade some decades to get them going. If we can cite as our solution, I suggest that we go with fusion reactors directly. The main barriers for building new nuclear plants are that they aren't cost effectiv…