It’s not that we don’t know how to design standardized plants, it was that the NRC wouldn’t allow an expedited permitting process for standard designs and treated each plant as a new design regardless.
Canada’s CANDU is used in many countries and in Canada itself. We used to build CANDUs for 1.5 billion. Now Ontario says a new one will be $26 billion. China is building large reactors for $4 billion.
The new Small Modular Reactors have one big advantage: the financial risk appears low enough for politicians to swallow. There’s a lot of political support building for SMRs, and I really hope they live up to their bidding because as things are going they may be needed to get us out of the energy hole we’re digging for ourselves.
Because fission reactors in constant use expose their critical working parts to a metric fuckton of radiation. After a few short decades, they are simply no longer usable because of that punishment. I recall a reactor built in the '70s, near where I lived at the time, which was given a life expectancy of 27 years (though it was shut down long before that and the tower felled in about '99).
We’re talking about design certification, not plant certification. If a plant design was safe 50 years ago, then it’s safe today by the same standards.
Of course, it might be that the plant design was never really safe and that we know better by now. Or it might be that our standards for safety have increased. But those things don’t seem to be reliably addressed by just having a short certification period.
More accurately, designs get a certificate. Plants get a license.
The license is already 40 years, and can be extended. PG&E is seeking a 20-year license extension for Diablo Canyon–it got its license in 1984 and is expected to operate until 2044. It seems a little weird that a plant can operate for 60 years, while a design certificate only lasts 30 years.
Last time I checked the differences between France and the US regarding nuclear power, it was clear to me that the solution then for France involved more science ed in schools and standardization of power plants that looked for many in the US then (and nowadays too, to many conservatives) as being ‘socialistic solutions’.
I’ve never heard the pro-nuke people ever refer to France that way. France has always been referred to as an example of how to do it right.
Three problems with nuclear power in the US:
Carter signed an executive order banning reprocessing of waste like France does, causing waste to be a major issue.
Standardization never happened because it had no advantage because US regulators refused to reduce certification time or effort if a standardized plant design was used.
The Anti-Nuclear movement spread misinformation and scared Americans for so long that a strong NIMBY attitude develooped among the citizenry, endlessly delaying nuclear projects.
I was talking about what the right (and most in America then) did that affected the progress of nuclear power. It may not had been a willing thing, but that is what happens when there is less funding for scientific education in a nation.
Speaking fairly, a better education and more government intervention would also have made any effort from misinformed people to make headway in those days. More educated people then to point and laugh at the misinformers.
Except the misinformers were movers and shakers in government and academia along with the activist groups. It was considered misinformation to disagree with them.
Again, being fair, lack of education (even of “experts” back then) was an important factor.
IIRC, another one in France was that cities or villages had skin in the nuclear game, energy subsidies and shares gained from living next to a nuclear power plant were, and are important now, to the support of nuclear power in France. (Again, a bit of a ‘socialistic’ solution).
Right. We keep hearing about ‘breakthroughs’, but has any fusion project ever achieved anything even close to 1% of fusion energy vs the total energy consumed by the apparatus? I don’t think so… cites welcome.
Plus there’s the problem of how to convert any fusion energy, which is not coming out in any convenient form, into useful power.
And again, most of the experiments seem to use tritium, which is not naturally available and needs a fission reactor to produce it. So why not just use the fission reactor as your power source?
It’s a nice idea, and I wish it could work, but I can’t see it happening without perhaps some breakthrough in fundemental physics?
Actually, there was a design that did promise to generate some power directly from the reaction. It was called “Magnetic Mirror” or “Magnetic Bottle” design, containing the plasma in a linear channel, which allowed some of it to leak out the ends: the leakage of charged particles could generate a small amount of direct electricity through particle deceleration. The bottle design has not really been explored much, but it may have been more feasible that we realize, because Reagan killed the largest project in the '80s, probably because his big oil sponsors feared it.
3H is typically created in the lithium blanket, which captures fleeing neutrons, breaking a small amount of the lithium into tritium as it also turns the neutron action into the heat that drives the steam turbines that generate the power. It is not like 235U fission other than that it is fission.