this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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A lot (all) nuclear accidents also occurred with older reactor designs.
Traditional nuclear reactors were designed in such a way that they required management to keep the reaction from running away. The reaction itself was self-sustaining and therefore the had to be actively moderated to stay inside safe conditions. If something broke, or was mis-managed, the reaction had a chance of continuing to grow out of control. That's called a melt-down.
As an imperfect analogy, older reactors were water towers. The machinery is keeping the water in an unstable state, and a failure means it comes crashing down to earth
Newer reactrs are designed so they they require active management to keep the reaction going. The reaction isn't self-sustaining, and requires outside power to maintain. If something breaks or is mismanaged, the reaction stops and the whole thing shuts down. That means they can't melt down.
As an imperfect analogy, newer reactors are water pumps. If power is interrupted nothing breaks catastrophically, water just stops moving.
Correct me if im wrong. I think most of the fears come from positive void coefficient reactors which some of the older reactors have like the RBMK which Chernobyl had. Unlike today where they are negative void coefficient.
You're correct, but the two groups that are anti nuclear are Boomers and The Greens parties.
Boomers are easy, they grew up with a few nuclear incidents, including reactor issues as well as the USSR stuff.
The Greens is paradoxal, youd think they were pronuclear, at least in the interrum. But they are anti nuclear because of a variety of reasons. So you see situations like in Germany recently where the Greens forced the government to get rid of nuclear reactors, and in their place, comes more Gas reactors.. Greens want 100% renewable, but don't seem to understand that they should be fighting for 0% fossil first .. then when that's obtained go for 100% renewables.
Because every time you remove a nuclear reactor, the only firm power replacement is a fossil fuel reactor.
I say this as a lifelong Greens voter, my political party have a small, and vocal group of idiots.
(In case you're wondering, yes the anti nuclear Greens are usually boomers)
I'm one of those guys. I voted to ban nuclear here in 2017.
I absolutely would love to put 0% fossil before 100% renewable. But as long as nuclear was a choice little more than token efforts were made to expand renewable capacity. Then we banned it and suddenly solar installations are sprouting like mushrooms. Before the ban we put in 330MW per year. The increase in the increase in solar was this much last year (670->1000MW)!
This month we had another vote in a climate bill and as soon as that was accepted the regressives came out and called for more nuclear and complained how all that solar and wind is going to ruin ~~christmas~~ the landscape. I'd love to have renewables AND nuclear but somehow it always ends up being an OR...
Just to be clear: This isn't an attack on pro-nuclear folks. I get your point and in theory you're right. I just never seen it put into practice...
the installed capacity is a nice number but unless you also install batteries AND take capacity factor into account, you're replacing load following dispatchable generation with intermittent ones that is backed by literal fossil fuels
I mean just look at the carbon intensity of a German kWh
Switzerland imports so much of it's energy I don't think it matters much yet. When it starts to matter we have huge hydro dams we can use for that.