I am a nuclear fanboy, because it is a clean and safe form of energy. But the EPR costs and building time are a tragedy for the entire sector and I have no problem in admitting that. But there are good third generation reactor like the hitachi abwr that are fast to build (less the 48 months) and relatively cheap (less than 5 billions).
The real problem is the amount of safety changes required to gen3 design after Fukushima (that was a gen2 reactor that suffered the worst earthquake and tsunami ever in the history of Japan and caused maybe a 1 single death after 4 years, just to put things in prospective).
But this is a problem in general for European nuclear. An APR-1400 costs 4.5 billion in Korea and 9 billions in Europe.
It was also fortunate that all it did was contaminate some towns and land forever uninhabitable.
I kinda understand the paranoia, I just wish I could hope that economies of scale would kick in after a while but we’ll just not build another one for almost exactly the right amount of time for all the institutional knowledge to disappear.
2.2% of Fukushima prefecture is nothing compared with the damage that fossil fuel is doing every single year to the entire planet. Even ignoring climate change, we are breathing pollution that is killing us. Radiation is a natural thing all around us, and our body evolved to correct for that below a certain threshold. Closing nuclear in germany before closing carbon killed a lot of people. If nuclear displace carbon I am more then happy with nuclear
I am a nuclear fanboy, because it is a clean and safe form of energy. But the EPR costs and building time are a tragedy for the entire sector and I have no problem in admitting that. But there are good third generation reactor like the hitachi abwr that are fast to build (less the 48 months) and relatively cheap (less than 5 billions).
The real problem is the amount of safety changes required to gen3 design after Fukushima (that was a gen2 reactor that suffered the worst earthquake and tsunami ever in the history of Japan and caused maybe a 1 single death after 4 years, just to put things in prospective).
But this is a problem in general for European nuclear. An APR-1400 costs 4.5 billion in Korea and 9 billions in Europe.
It was also fortunate that all it did was contaminate some towns and land forever uninhabitable.
I kinda understand the paranoia, I just wish I could hope that economies of scale would kick in after a while but we’ll just not build another one for almost exactly the right amount of time for all the institutional knowledge to disappear.
2.2% of Fukushima prefecture is nothing compared with the damage that fossil fuel is doing every single year to the entire planet. Even ignoring climate change, we are breathing pollution that is killing us. Radiation is a natural thing all around us, and our body evolved to correct for that below a certain threshold. Closing nuclear in germany before closing carbon killed a lot of people. If nuclear displace carbon I am more then happy with nuclear