Some issues I see are accountants, management, laziness, "somebody else's problem", etc. Those are businesses and they will try all the well-known ways to save money. Which the politicians will also encourage, because nuclear power will need to be justified continuously (like all other forms).
There also are water issues, not just river temperature (France, this summer), we also had a lot of European rivers with barely enough or not enough for most of the normal uses of those rivers this summer - and predictions are we'll have more such extremes. So, ensuring water supplies will be adequate at all times will become harder too, and much more expensive.
Air plane and human space flight accidents are extremely rare but they still occur despite all the rules and regulations and the training and the many levels of precautions, but nuclear has to be even better.
And France having maintenance issues is in large part because of the anti-nuclear campaign that increasingly started to attempt to move away from nuclear. For a while even in France they basically just wanted to run the reactors out and switch to renewables.
So the politics goes like this, cause maintenance delay, condemn nuclear for maintenance delay. Seriously, these delays are being handled in a reasonable time-frames and most of the reactors will be back when they are really needed.
Consider that with the age of these reactors, wind-farms would have to be mostly rebuilt to a larger degree.
Also, if we actually made progress on technology then we could have had moved on to air-cooled designs but sadly we can't have nice things.
> Not to mention that Russia - Rosatom - will again play a big role in Western European energy when it comes to nuclear.
Good thing that 1), nuclear fuel storage in europe tend to have almost decade long stockpiles, 2), there are plenty of alternative to Rosatom to buy nuclear fuel from, 3), nuclear fuel is fairly easy to import compared to massive amount of natural gas.
Sweden is only a stone throw away and they have nuclear fuel production that they sell as exports. They also acquired the design and patents to produce nuclear fuel that fit power plants from Rosatom. Those 20% of fuel that Russia sell is a solvable problem, but as with anything it would cost money, investments and a bit of time to ramp up production.
There's various kinds of human errors (and humans will continue to make errors), equipment malfunctions, problems during equipment maintenance and so on.
Can you call "human incompetence" something to be planned for? Yes, sure, you have to plan for it. Can you plan it well enough so that it simply doesn't happen? Doesn't seem to have happened so far. Does it concern me too much? No. But do other people have to have the same risk tolerance? Also no. It's been proven that people are averse to rare-but-acute risks and can more easily accept frequent small risks (i.e. radiation and contamination from coal plants).
All that is to say that if people are concerned, it's on us to understand the reasons, not just shout into that void that "nuclear is SAFE!!!"
Agreed. "A good reactor design" to that definition is enormously hard though - I'll be incredibly happy if that gets solved, hopefully with a modular "built in a factory" design that can be easily replicated and remain very safe.
No bad reactor designs get built or have been built in the West in many decades.
Better designs would have been here long ago if we actually had continued with this technology, but its not that current reactors are truly bad designs.
The problem with them is more that they don't fit into how energy markets and energy investments are made and have been made. That goes for both the US and Europe.
Some issues I see are accountants, management, laziness, "somebody else's problem", etc. Those are businesses and they will try all the well-known ways to save money. Which the politicians will also encourage, because nuclear power will need to be justified continuously (like all other forms).
There also are water issues, not just river temperature (France, this summer), we also had a lot of European rivers with barely enough or not enough for most of the normal uses of those rivers this summer - and predictions are we'll have more such extremes. So, ensuring water supplies will be adequate at all times will become harder too, and much more expensive.
Not to mention that Russia - Rosatom - will again play a big role in Western European energy when it comes to nuclear. (https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2022/russias-multi-mill...)
Air plane and human space flight accidents are extremely rare but they still occur despite all the rules and regulations and the training and the many levels of precautions, but nuclear has to be even better.