if building nuclear power plants in America is, reputedly, delayed and made overly expensive by various regulatory and political hurdles, why don’t American companies that do this sort of stuff go to Mexico and build them there? The energy generated could then be both sold in Mexico and exported to American southwest.
In practice this page http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf106.html seems to suggest that they have only built a single power plant (back in 1989) and now there is “some government support for expanding nuclear energy to reduce reliance on natural gas”. Well, why don’t they go about it China-style, in a rapid and deliberate manner?
First of all, what makes you think there aren’t regulatory and political hurdles to building the plants in Mexico? Especially to having American companies doing the building? Mexico is very protective of its energy industry.
Second, you usually want power plants located not too far from the consumers using the power. The area near the U.S./Mexican border is not densely populated, except for a few locations.
The recent Wired article about nuclear power also points out that uranium reactors only have fuel to run about 100 more years. The USSR and the USA went to uranium fuel because it wasn’t all that expensive, and had the byproduct in some cases of making material for nuclear bombs. WIN all around!
The Wired article argues for a new breed of reactor based on thorium, which is much more abundant and creates much less radioactive waste. I suppose when the energy needs of the world get bad enough, we’ll see frantic development of that.
Wait, did you ask why the Mexican government didn’t do something in a “rapid and deliberate manner”? That’s very funny. This is a country that has the drug dealing gangsters buying billboards to recruit soldiers to its side because it pays better. Recently there was a mayor who triumphantly announced the death of a local drug thug. Except that his body hadn’t been discovered by the police yet. The problem is so bad that vigilante gangs are forming out of the locals and apparently even local government.
Now, do you want to invest millions in a project that will have slimy characters hanging around suggesting that for a certain fee, they will make sure that the construction workers aren’t beaten and the preliminary structure not damaged?
Electricity from the Pacific Northwest gets transmitted a thousand miles to Southern California. Here is a graphic of the US grid; electricity ends up a long way from where it is generated.
Anti-nuke myth; there’s enough for millennia. For among other reasons, fuel is such a small part of the cost that you could for example extract uranium from seawater and still have affordable fuel.
the gangsters part is a good point, but then every nation has its share of rent-seeking thieving SOBs. I doubt that gangsters in Mexico could waste as much money for a nuclear power plant as the lawyers, environmentalists and bureaucrats here in America.
A nuclear plant would also be a lot easier to guard than most things. It’d be a contained area, the thugs would know if they attacked it, then they’d have not only the Mexican government but the USA as well on their backs. Not officially of course but we’d be in like a flash.
Thugs and gangs are organizations, they aren’t a bunch of crazies, these are business people. They weigh risks against costs.
It’s most likely the USA would see that Mexico isn’t in any shape to have nuclear plants and offer the Mexicans some incentive not to build them. Mexico gets a lot of help from the USA, you don’t cut off your nose to spite your face, well usually you don’t
Mexico is also full of oil. I would say that is the reason they don’t build plants. Nuclear plants have been unpopular since Three Mile Island and downright hostile since Chernobyl. So how does Mexico build these and maintain good will, especially since it’s full of oil. Just the way Iran is full of oil and building plants puts them under sususpicion
Any country that has a decent percentage of its population risking life and limb to illegally sneak into another country where they don’t speak the language, can be deported if caught, and will be paid minimum wage and be treated by many there as second class citizens really isnt in a position to do anything as high tech, fault intolerant, high capital, and long term as nuclear power.
Please cite some sources for the vigilante gang claims.
The cartels do NOT bother construction workers or people in general for that matter. For the most part they try to cultivate goodwill on the part of the populace. They spend lots of money in lots of places. During this economic downturn, which has hit the construction particularly hard, most of the large, private construction projects are funded by the cartels.
On the occasions where innocent civilians are harmed it is in most cases, to borrow a phrase from your lexicon, collateral damage in the “war” on drugs.
Many of our problems are a direct consequence of the insatiable appetite for illegal drugs in your country. One can just as easily argue that your country truly sucks as evidenced by so many of its citizens taking refuge in an altered state of mind.
As far as technology goes, what we lack we can import. I’m sure the French, who have never suffered a Three Mile Island disaster, would be more than happy to give us a hand. They probably don’t overlook such small but important details as putting alarms on the condensate pump.
Its pretty simple. The fuel cost of running a nuclear reactor is a tiny fraction of the operating costs. If the FUEL cost went up by a factor of 10, the total cost of electricity production would only go up a little bit, not a factor of 10. If the market for uranium would support a price 10 times higher, it would be cost effective to extract it from sea water. It would take A LONG TIME to extract even a fraction of the uranium thats in seawater (and I suspect that a bonus of this operation would be the production of much fresh water).
The details could be off a bit here, but thats the gist of it.
Its like have a car that cost 10s of millions of dollars. The montly payments and insurance and repairs are WAY more than the fuel bill. The fuel bill is nearly in the noise by comparison.
If the country can’t be fucking bothered to have clean drinking water for its citizens, what in the world would make you think that they could handle building a lot of nuclear power plants?
Hmm… can only assume that Wired meant the normal sources of uranium.
Still, they argue strongly for investigation of thorium reactors. I admit I’m just going on their “expertise”, but does anyone have any expert input on the idea?
Thorium is a good idea, cause that stuff is way more common than uranium. And a thorium fuel cycle may have other advantages. But having said that, even if thorium did not exist, uranium fueled fission would solve our energy problems for a long time.
Let’s tone it down. If you want to point out factors in Mexico that will work against the scenario in the OP, that’s fair enough. But let’s not be insulting about it.
