Thread: Electric Boats
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Old 07-13-2022, 03:08 PM   #37
Nick14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by backinblue View Post
Just curious Nick, and you probably know more than me, but why are we not embracing more nuclear power? Obviously there is the waste disposal issue, but are there other reasons? Seems like a clean solution to me.
I'm far from an expert, but I see several problems with nuclear fission that to me make it unattractive.

1) Waste. The problems, costs, and risks of having to process and store nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years are clear.

2) Time and cost. It takes a long time and costs a lot of money to build a nuclear power plant. It can cost around $25 billion to build a nuclear power plant with roughly 1,000 MW generating capacity - astronomically high compared with the alternatives -

https://constructionphysics.substack...r-construction

and take an average of 7 years to do it -

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...rs-since-1981/

and usually run into cost overruns and time delays -

https://energy.mit.edu/news/building...-power-plants/

3) Poor net energy yield. When you fully consider all of the time, cost, and energy expenditures needed to build and run a nuclear power plant - mining, processing, and enriching the uranium, running the plant, processing and storing the waste - the net energy yield is minimal to negative.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...60544288900801

If you have to put in X amount of energy to get out a net of 0.9X, you can't make that up in volume.

4) Risk of accidents. While accidents can happen with any kind of power generation, the examples of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima have shown very dramatically the potential consequences when something goes wrong with nuclear power.

The consistency of power output might be more stable with nuclear power compared with solar or wind. But there are other, more important issues. The above problems outweigh that advantage in my mind.

Nuclear fusion is a completely different animal. There has been some encouraging progress lately. But, at almost any time over the past 40 years, nuclear fusion has been '10 years away', which it still is. It's always been '10 years away.' It's important to continue the work, but it's still in the research stage, not yet development, so unwise to count on it until it demonstrates scalable and economic feasibility.
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