this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia (www.nbcnews.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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First U.S. nuclear reactor built from scratch in decades enters commercial operation in Georgia::ATLANTA — A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I would be very interested to know why the trend has moved away from building reactors in time and within a reasonable budget. It seems that most projects after the turn of the millennium haven't been cost effective.

Why did we manage to build reactors well before but not now?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Chernobyl and Fukushima. These two events, which between them account for a few thousand deaths at most (compared with the tens of thousands of deaths caused by coal in Europe alone, for example), triggered a panic fear of nuclear power.

For decades, the nuclear industry has been abandoned and sabotaged, with projects such as Phénix, Superphénix and Astrid in France, and virtually all new reactor projects, cancelled due to anti-nuclear opposition.

Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.

We can also thank the Germans for sabotaging the EPR. We started the project together, they forced us to add a lot of totally unjustified redundancies and safety features that made the prototype very complex and therefore costly to build, and then they slammed the door on us.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Competent nuclear engineers and technicians have retired without being able to pass on their know-how, and cutting-edge nuclear-related industries have disappeared or been converted.

This same fear has been enough to fund SLS and Ariane programs. Basically to avoid the loss of a capability in case it's needed later on. For some reason it doesn't seem to apply to nuclear. And now people are complaining that building new reactors is expensive, arguably at least partially due to the supply chains no longer existing in the same scale as before.