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Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ... by pfdietz on Saturday February 16, 2019 @09:05AM (#19178586)
> Those costs are entirely political.

This is simply not true. There has been tremendous ongoing incompetence and mismanagement in the reactor construction process in recent years. You may blame regulation -- that's the goto excuse for pronuclear people to avoid coming to unpleasant conclusions -- but the problem is that reactors are complicated things, and reactors with safety systems are even more complicated things (and reactors without regulation are complicated things that will almost certainly fail in unpleasant ways.) Building complicated things is hard, especially if all the institutional knowledge of how to do it, and the supply chains for the parts, have decayed away.

The huge advantage solar/wind have is they are simple and scalable. Installations consist of thousands, or even millions, of replicated parts. Experience builds up rapidly as the same damned thing is built and installed over and over. Nuclear doesn't have that.

Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ... by javagram on Saturday February 16, 2019 @10:30AM (#19178988)
> Experience builds up rapidly as the same damned thing is built and installed over and over. Nuclear doesn't have that.

Do you think this is the reason the US Navy doesn’t seem to have major problems getting nuclear power plants built and installed in submarines and aircraft carriers? It’s interesting how civilian power companies have had a bunch of high profile failures in this area but as far as I can tell new warships still seem to be able to get reactors fine.

Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ... by afterburner on Monday February 18, 2019 @07:38PM (#19195794)
What's the power output of those I imagine much smaller reactors, compared to ones meant to power entire regions and millions of consumers? What did they cost to build? What risks are there, compared to regular reactors?
Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ... by javagram on Sunday February 24, 2019 @10:18AM (#19238846)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Naval_...

The A1B being installed on the newest carriers is a 700 MW unit being installed in a pair, so 1.4 GW total. That number seems comparable to a lot of commercial power generation, e.g. Vermont Yankee is a 620 MW plant.

Re:First contact made with melted nuclear fuel at Fukushima ... by lostlogin on Saturday February 16, 2019 @04:16PM (#19180986)
Yes. There is a book by Serhii Plonkhy called ‘Chrrnobyl’. The lasting impression I have is that every single stage of management, design and construction was broken. One chapter alone makes the whole great book worthwhile - describing the Russian presentation at the European conference in Switzerland after the disaster.