| > Power outages, while not at the level of a third world country, are quite frequent. Nuclear is the highest energy density power generation you can get. Well that is more because the American grid is suffering from a mountain load of neglect-debt to a tune that paints the infamous German railways as saints - the Camp Fire for example was most likely caused by a C-hook breaking after many, many decades of neglect [1]. Here in Europe, we get by just fine with outages measured in maybe a dozen minutes (!) a year [2] - Germany got rid of all nuclear reactors, many old ones in other countries were retired as well (Fessenheim, the most infamous one, in 2020), and while there are new builds, they are often decades late and many billions over budget. How do we do this? We have strict regulations across the board (mandating stuff such as resilience against bad weather, unlike Texas which IIRC refuses to tie in to the other US grids to avoid such regulation), a cross-continental spanning grid [3], and most especially... we just love to bury our cables belowground, so even in the case lightning or storms hit, the actual impact on the consumers is all but negligible. And as the infamous summer of 2023 shows, the power grid still didn't fail even as dozens of NPPs in France and Switzerland had to completely shut down or significantly reduce output because there was not enough cooling water [4]. Hell we even manage to supply an entire country at war with decent power, despite Russia continuously attacking the power grid. [1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/long-term-wear-found-o... [2] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37960/umfrage... [3] https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/ [4] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/high-river-temperatu... |