On 11/26/06 3:53 PM, "mike wilson", <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The (at least) two that we've already had don't count, then? I know > farmers in Wales still affected after Chernobyl, twenty years ago. Nor > the fire in the graphite core at Windscale that spread radioactive > particles over most of western England? It's not the frequency that > matters, it's the magnitude. Yes, I was almost referring to these :-). But those two were badly designed examples. Soviet one did not even have sufficient core cooling capability. Graphite core reactors also are usually obsolete. Most modern power reactors are light water (ordinary H2O) based or some heavy water based (Canadian ones). Their records, in spite of a couple of accidents, are excellent. No China Syndrome. Last time I worked on those was 20 years ago but the technologies advanced. The over-engineering problems and very strict regulatory requirements almost drove away investors. Regulatory clearance/environmental hearing alone takes several years before obtaining the license to build one of those nuke plants, and they take another several years of construction before the actual power generation, with billions of dollars of fund required. With this long lead time, the power company still has to forecast the future power demand fairly accurately and then have to finance those projects. That's why most of these power are being built with some government incentives to alleviate the risk or by giant private utility companies like in Japan. It was not quite like that years ago in the U.S. for example. Look what happened in the U.S. reactor market in the last few decades. Non built. Now the Bush Administration is talking about building more nuke plants, now that they figured that they cannot divert the oil from Iraq (just kidding :-). I cannot authoritatively say this but if the licensing requirements for nuke plants come down reasonably even a bit, the cost of electricity from them could come down by at least 30%. Then electric powered vehicles could become a feasible proposition. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
