An 80-Year Run for Nuclear Reactors?

[jpak]

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/an-80-year-run-for-nuclear-reactors/?partner=rss&emc=rss

With the so-called “nuclear renaissance” looking smaller and slower than predicted, some in the nuclear industry are focusing on running existing plants longer — not only for their initial 40-year licensing period and the 20-year extension already allowed, but for a second 20-year extension.

“If you would have looked five years ago at the number of plants people were intending to construct and then you look today, it’s clear with the economic conditions we face in our nation, they’re pushing the builds out there,’’ said Maria Korsnick, the chief nuclear officer with Constellation Energy Group. (In industry-speak, that means delaying construction.)

In fact, her own company dropped out of a partnership to build a third reactor at its Calvert Cliffs site, 50 miles south of Washington, last month.

But in a conference call this week with reporters, Ms. Korsnick warned, “If you let these current units retire, you’re going to end up with a gap before you’ll be able to build the new nuclear plants to take their place.’’


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[Iterate]

1. And of course if past is prologue

you press a technology until it fails, then do a mea culpa and back off a bit. And we know how companies get bored with the old stuff, it gets the third-rate maintenance while the best engineers move on to build careers with the bright and shiny.

I'm not saying that an old-plant failure would necessarily would necessarily be catastrophic -it might not be- but it would be large and might be messy.

Since the very selling point is that you can build a few large power plants and not have to give up your personal walk-in refrigerator, that means that when it does fail, in about 2040 or 2050, it will be, by definition, a large part of capacity and probably happen at the worst time.

Many smaller nodes make the most robust networks. We all know that. So let's build many small nodes.

[bananas]

2. yup - this will pretty much guarantee another catastrophic failure like Chernobyl or worse

It's a stupid thing to even talk about.

[joshcryer]

3. I think all fission reactor technology except for MSRs are crap.

Since MSRs don't exist in any commercial capacity, nuclear fission reactor technology is a dud. It costs too much, it requires way too much safety redundancies, and overall is a pain in the ass to work out.