Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[dennisp]

I suspect it would be instructive to see a similar accident list for fossil plants.

I doubt there’s anyone here who wouldn’t agree that if focus fusion works, all forms of fission will be obsolete. Or that we should spend some billions on researching FF and other alternative fusion projects.

But until somebody actually achieves net power using fusion, it looks to me like the best option for building new power plants today is fission. It’s way better than letting hundreds of thousands of people die every year from coal emissions. By comparison, we have:

Three Mile Island, which didn’t hurt anybody,

Chernobyl, which was an ancient design with a horrible positive feedback and no containment dome, and

Fukushima, which was a 1970s plant hit by a 9.0 earthquake and tsunami. Another fission plant right next door was built ten years later with improved safety features, and got through the same challenges just fine.

And that’s our record with GenII reactors, using active safety systems. GenIII+ is a lot better, and when you get into things like liquid thorium reactors, safety goes to a whole different level. There’s no meltdown potential there either, or anything that could cause an explosion.

Bottom line: the world is going to spend tens of trillions of dollars over the next several decades, replacing and expanding our energy infrastructure. It’s crazy not to spend mere billions now researching every advanced energy source we can.

But until we have better stuff available, I’d much rather build GenIII+ fission than fossil plants. As for cost, France is 80% nuclear with complicated old non-modular GenII plants, and has the cheapest electricity in Europe.