Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but if you want to be safe and resilient against earthquakes and other natural disasters, those are potentially going to take out long distance transmission lines, too.
Then build them to be resilient against that.
Japan Turns to Coal After Closing Nuclear Power Plants
141–142 of 142 posts
Re: Japan Turns to Coal After Closing Nuclear Power Plants
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
These shutdowns are largely political, not due to structural damage to the reactors from the earthquake. These reactors weren't shut down because there was fear the earthquake had damaged them, and calling them non-working is only accurate in that they aren't online and doing work - outside of issues from lack of use while shutdown, they are fully functional. Fukushima was not properly built to withstand a tsunami of…
Fukushima was just one of the many "not properly built" power plants. The problem with nuclear is that you can't just say "this plant is clearly a safety hazard, lets upgrade to the newest design" like you can do with software. Security problems will stay until you shut the plant down and build a new one. That means the only way to make nuclear viable is by making smaller modular reactors where replacing a single one…
The primary problem with the big plants is that these older designs don't fail safe. The newer generations will. Catastrophic failure means "We stop making power", not "We irradiated everything close to us"
That's why people are "shilling" for Gen IV designs.
I'm not sure there's "many" plants that are unsafe due to natural disasters like this one. It isn't like we have hundreds of plants in an area where there are 100 year natural disasters that can take them out - otherwise we'd see these things happening all of the time. There are unsafe plants out there. For sure. But we haven't lost as many lives to every nuclear accident ever as we have to coal power generation in the US alone. We know there is a path to safety for nuclear designs, we know they are a very efficient method of power generation, and we know they're not going to cause the global temperature to rise. The failures are more spectacular in appearance than the normal operation of our current primary sources of energy, and that's the primary issue, even though the death count still swings spectacularly towards the normal operation of coal power plants.
We should be building modern nuclear reactors. I personally don't care if they're big Gen IV plants or small neighborhood ones - I just think the Gen IV designs are more likely to come to fruition.