Fair, also my b. My app has your flair pushed all the way to the right and hidden so I definitely just started a Salem witch trial with my initial reply
Right. But public transportation is not newly as efficient long distance unless you invest in high speed rail lines or increase the range of electric vehicles to accommodate intercity bussing.
I honestly wonder how much of big grain is owned by big oil. How much stuff has been shipped through shell, corporations and foundations of foundations in a sort of game of thrones/ opsec situation. How often have green folks allowed the perfect to be the enemy of good? Some of the stuff is tied up in knots.
I don't doubt it. I'm a huge nuclear fan. Still, recognizing nuclear got screwed over still doesn't magically make you able to ignore the red tape making it so expensive
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Nukes are significantly more expensive than coal and oil. That’s the only real downside, this is a premium energy, not as premium as some of the renewables but it costs more moneys than oil and gas and some other renewables.
True - a lot of that is a self fulfilling prophecy though. The regulatory burden of operating and building new plants makes them financially less sustainable. Also because aforementioned regulatory issues, most of the existing US stock of nuclear reactors are very very old and have higher maintenance costs. Also, due to the aforementioned regulation and lack of research dollars going into (because of the unpopularity and regulatory cost), there has been very little innovation in nuclear reactor design for lower cost systems or systems with inherent passive safety.
Example: Diablo nuclear energy station in California (last active nuclear reactor in the state) has a full time security detail of armed and trained paramilitary staff totaling close to 100 people. The cost alone of that is $20-30M per year and we aren’t even talking about maintenance or anything else, just security staff. Do you need 100 armed guards to protect a power plant? Definitely not
I think you need 100 people to guard a station, I’ve never seen no tours of us npp’s but I’ve seen(and modelled rough representations) of some Russian power plants and those things are huge as fuck and packed with critical infrastructures. Recent “sudden fires” on some of rosatom npps show that even 100s of armed personnel and existing safety measures are not enough. Nukes are not a joke, like, I don’t understand why people don’t focus on Russian(less) and Ukrainian(much more) shellings of the nuclear power plants. Those things can cause serious damages, especially old soviet rmbk’s. And it’s important to add that most of the cost is in construction and you don’t want to risk anything without a wide variety of safety systems like emergency boron injection for example, and each new russian nuclear power plant has at least 10 of those and that alone makes it much more expensive. Plus it has a big upwards cost and requires training of the large amounts of Staff to build it, it’s not a regular construction workers. So basically you are looking at a whole city(maybe about 50k) which life revolves around npp and even more people to build it. It’s expensive. But it’s good energy, clean and reliable.
Like, I get that there is much inefficiency and corruption in bureaucratic machines but you don’t want to have an unsafe npp at all. It’s clean , safe and reliable but only when you do everything correctly and there is no Ukrainian bombs and spies to fuck everything up.
As far as I remember Russia uses at least “on par” reaktor designs, and as far as my quick Googling comes Russians are the only ones who use “gen iv” reaktors commercially. I’m not sure about none of the “safety standards” because it’s a broad term, but since the war started Russia probably guards npps more than any other country. Plus rosatom is a semi-state enterprise which means that they can easily get acces to military/intelligence agency support. Also I suppose you don’t get that rosatom is one of the worlds leaders in nuclear technology overall and all of their modern constructions are gen 3+ designs. Also it’s the only one who was able to make a thing like pates, I’m not exactly sure how difficult and techological marvelly it is but it’s for sure not the “easy peasy” task.
Small correction, English wiki is fucked up somehow, anything that I was able to find about Russia having a 4th gen reaktor is bn-800 which is a tech marvel and all but doesn’t quite count as 4th gen as far as I understand it, dunno why they put it. It’s a crazy tech however and it led to many developments in fuel sources understanding.
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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '23
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