Re:Germany's Energy Catastrophe
by ok_dad on Friday July 15, 2022 @02:49AM
(#32105373)
> Why is the control slower for nuclear?
Maintaining a critical fission reaction is difficult and in a large plant you might have to coordinate hundreds of people in dozens of locations to reduce power. Starting up a plant takes math and precise measurements, and there’s a natural limit to the speed you can do so or else you can cause a runaway supercritical reaction. Also, to be the most efficient, they are designed to run at near capacity for their lifetimes, and reducing the power would cancel that, so it’s simply not designed into the system to be reactive like that, as opposed to a submarine plant which is designed to power up and down a bit over short time frames.
Maintaining a critical fission reaction is difficult and in a large plant you might have to coordinate hundreds of people in dozens of locations to reduce power. Starting up a plant takes math and precise measurements, and there’s a natural limit to the speed you can do so or else you can cause a runaway supercritical reaction. Also, to be the most efficient, they are designed to run at near capacity for their lifetimes, and reducing the power would cancel that, so it’s simply not designed into the system to be reactive like that, as opposed to a submarine plant which is designed to power up and down a bit over short time frames.