Should Disney World Have the Right to Build a Nuclear Power Plant?

Re:Should Disney World Have the Right to Build a Nuclear Pow... by sonnyblarney on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @07:46PM (#19924882)

Thorium, alternative reactors, reprocessing - all of this requires a lot of research and it's exceedingly expensive. Private entities won't touch it and it's difficult for governments to invest.

If the numbers added up China would be doing it already, but even for them - where they can still socialize the costs of failure (i.e. if it blows up, oh well, whereas in the West there's $100B in lawsuits) - it's expensive.

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Re:Should Disney World Have the Right to Build a Nuclear Pow... by nitrogen on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @11:03PM (#19925798)

Private entities won't touch it and it's difficult for governments to invest.

Not Thorium, but Bill Gates is invested in alternative nuclear, along with the US govt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraPower

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Re:Should Disney World Have the Right to Build a Nuclear Pow... by sonnyblarney on Thursday May 16, 2019 @02:41AM (#19926717)

Yes, thorium. And everything else. Gates put $35M into it, which is peanuts. In order to transform Nuclear the R&D will have to be in the order of billions.

Drug companies can put more than that into a single failed drug, for comparison.

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Re:Should Disney World Have the Right to Build a Nuclear Pow... by keanzu on Thursday May 16, 2019 @07:36AM (#19928006)

A nuclear meltdown in China would call into question the government’s competence. “If an event like Fukushima punctures that image of competence, that’s very, very consequential,” says William Overholt, a China expert at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “That would delegitimize the regime.”

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