Seeing that they need quite a lot of clean water, which is not widely available everywhere during the entire year in big amounts, especially with these droughts due to climate change.
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There’s many different nuclear reactor designs
For the traditional ones that require lots of cooling water, oceans are typically used so they don’t suffer from droughts. If you actually need fresh water you have desalinization available, and nuclear power can power that.
There are more self-contained designs, as you would see on ships.
They’re also some hands-off designs that generate low amounts of power over a long period of time used for remote installations.
Would the hypothetical nuclear fusion power plant require less water? And do you think that when we finally find out how to do it, a fusion based design will become widespread?
Fusion designs currently require a ton of water for cooling (first wall and divertor) beyond what is needed for electricity production.
You’re asking me to speculate about a hypothetical. Depending on the type of nuclear fusion that actually comes to be … maybe.
Regardless of the fusion process itself, which might require prodigious amounts of heavy water or maybe even normal water I don’t know.
There’s what do you do with the heat, so in a traditional power plant, you generate heat, the heat is used to create steam, and the steam is used then generate electricity or do other types of useful mechanical work. This could be a closed circuit design, but it might be easier to have open circuits if you have available water. But once the water, steam has done the work, you might have to recycle it recapture it, cool it down. IE evaporative towers…
Could you build a nuclear power plant, or even a fusion power plant, that runs in the desert? Yes probably. Would it be more expensive than the equivalent plant near water source? Yes of course…
Look at Helion. Their tech is kinda great and shows a lot of promise. Their fusion implementation dispenses with the whole “boil water to spin a turbine” method of power generation entirely. They rely on induction and the strong magnetic flux that the fusion process releases to directly convert the fusion process into electricity. Honestly, is is pretty genius. Further reading: Their patants Technology Review article
Ah, that you for your detailed response
You need water to generate steam to turn a turbine and make electricity (same for coal, natural gas, fusion). However, many advanced reactor designs do not use water for the reactor coolant itself, unlike light water reactors that do. They use gas, molten salt, or liquid metals. As a result, you can get to quite high temperatures useful for process heat, such as hydrogen production. Direct desalination might also be doable, the issue/question being on the design of the non-nuclear side of the plant.
A lot of Gen IV designs are in the process of commercialization now, with demonstrations slated for later this decade.
Nuclear is feasible in lots of places if the question is, “given enough money can we build a nuclear plant here?”
Nuclear gets much less feasible if the question is, “how do we generate electricity in the most cost effective way we can?”
Yeah, let’s not add a financial incentive to cut corners on the nuclear reactor.
Most power generation methods like coal have similar requirements, and it doesn’t have to be clean water. In costal areas, seawater can be used just fine.
Can this be an effective method of desalinization?
If seawater is used, couldn’t the steam be captured for fresh water?
You use seawater for cooling the systems. You could use excess power to run desalination plants, but not use the reactor directly.
I wouldn’t worry too much about water availability for cooling (even though it’s an issue). I see a bigger “political” issue
A safe nuclear industry requires at laest the two following stuff
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A solid academic and industrial tradition, able to train skilled engineer and technician, but also researcher to prepare the future.
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A government strong enough to deal with the NIMBY, but weak enough to have an independent nuclear safety agency able to perform audits without caring about political pressure.
This works in a country like France, may still work in a country like Germany or US (even though NIMBY have more power there) but many country especially in the * third world* don’t have either trained “nuclear scientists” or a government able to guarantee nuclear safety
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The largest hurdles to nuclear power are PR. Water usage of nuclear plants is able to recycle most if not all of what they utilize and the high energy density and capable power output makes it much more economical to pump water from further away to sustain the plant and needs of regional communities, especially compared to fossil fuels plants that largely use water in the same capacity as nuclear. If a coal or gas plant was viable in a location, then nuclear would be just as if not more capable in that location.
You could replace every coal plant in the world with nuclear and the only major logistics disruption would be supplying them with enough uranium.
They’re not economically feasible anywhere right now. Unfortunately nuclear power is very expensive compared to all the alternatives. Unless there’s some radical breakthrough I can’t see much nuclear being built in the future. No company would pay such a huge up-front cost to produce uneconomic electricity.
So the strict answer is - no, they’re not feasible everywhere. And also not feasible pretty much anywhere.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
Yes and no. Renewables are the best, but they’re inconsistent.
The environmental impact of coal is much worse than nuclear, so nuclear is a good consistent baseline power to be supplemented by renewable generation.
The base load argument doesn’t hold water any more - not when there are places which are progressing towards being totally free of base load. Eg. South Australia is already nearly all renewable power with in-fill from batteries and transient gas power when needed. They’re still currently getting some base load from other states but it’s small and gradually being phased out.
For the foreseeable future, nuclear would work fine. As long as there isn’t corrosive compounds the water works fine, and there is enough uranium alone to power nuclear plants for the next 2000 years
Wait, only 2000 years? As in this is how much we’ve mined or is this how much is available to mine? And is that assuming we maintain our current level of consumption? 2000 years feels way too short for something that all of humanity relies on.
Considering how long we’ve had nuclear power and how short a time electricity has widely been in use, 2000 years is a crazy long time. Given how quickly we’ve developed power generation technology, it’s highly likely that we adopt other technologies like solar, wind, and hopefully fusion reactors long before we run out of uranium.
Slightly off topic, there are about 450 nuclear plants on earth. A noted MIT study in 1989 estimated that each nuclear plant only has a worst case nuclear accident every 20000 years.
Statistically that would make one every 44 years.
In our history we have had nuclear power plants for about 60 years, and so far there were three worst case nuclear accidents.
Yeah, but those worst case nuclear accidents have nothing on coal in terms of a death count. They sound scary, but overall don’t come even close to it.
True but In 2023 the alternatives are not nuclear vs coal, but nuclear vs wind and solar. The fallout for each accident is immense. Western Europe dealt with Tschernobyl for years. Japan was just lucky that the wind blew in the other direction.
If the world triples nuclear power plants, and we deal with an accident every 7-10 years, that’s gonna be a serious problem, even if it is “just” country sized areas that become unfarmable or so.
Pitting nuclear against wind and solar is stupid given how much they compliment each other.
A study from 1989 doesn’t apply to modern plants built 35 years later, it really doesn’t make sense to extrapolate it like this.
While true, the study obviously underestimated the evidence we gathered in the real world. It’s not simple to handle numbers with many 0 behind them, therefore it’s good to have multiple approaches.
“Dealt with Chernobyl for years…”
You realise that all the estimated premature deaths are less than respiratory issues from air pollution. We could have a Chernobyl every year and it would be an improvement.
We can not have clean emergy because coal miners have to mine coal.
If they don’t mine that coal then the whole thing falls apart.
That 3 in 60 is pretty loaded since Chernobyl simply would not have been possible with western reactors of the same design year, to say nothing of what passed as modern than and even more so now.
It would also not have been possible with their design, if all the failguards wouldn’t have failed.
But 2 in 60 years, both of western design, is still more than that study estimated.
What study is that? Can you give a reference?
