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by skybrian 54 days ago
Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.
2 comments
protocolture 54 days ago
Thats the issue with those AGR reactors the brits have IIRC, perfect (or close enough) safety record, super complex and not economical to run.
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socalgal2 54 days ago
They're expensive because of, arguably, over regulation. The are not inherently expensive, we've just declared them so. The next response will be "all that regulation is needed" but it's arguably that the over regulation is killing people by the unintended consequences of keeping things like coal viable, etc...
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petre 54 days ago
The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to.

Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development.

Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.

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fc417fc802 53 days ago
You left out the culture of borderline malfeasance on the utility's part and the failure to aggressively pursue that culture on the regulator's part.

Anyway if the fine print were risk of catastrophic failure in the event of a >9.0 earthquake I think that would be acceptable (and I think a lot of people would agree with me) depending on the geography where it was to be built.

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cineticdaffodil 53 days ago
How could japan have made that powerplant tsunami proof? Put the emergency generators on a pontoon or on a inland moumountain?
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Moldoteck 52 days ago
put some generators on roof. Generator placement in Jp was based on BWRs placement in US - underground, which is sane considering tornados and stuff. But it wasnt adapted there
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skybrian 53 days ago
The same way anyone else avoids flooding: by building it on slightly higher ground.
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Moldoteck 52 days ago
the cost problem is lost experience to build stuff. It's not like berlins airport is so expensive because of new whistles. Many western nations forgot to build. Japanese ABWR has a lower core damage frequency vs french EPR yet EPR took 20y and ABWR - 4
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skybrian 54 days ago
I meant, the particular way the Navy does it might be too expensive for some reason. Do you know anything about that?
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frollogaston 54 days ago
Right. There are countries that aren't particularly wealthy and rely on nuclear power just because they don't have reliable fossil fuel sources.
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