Re:World Appears on Track to Triple Renewable Power by 2030
by vlovich123 on Wednesday November 29, 2023 @12:37PM
(#38462378)
And yet, we have newer generations of reactors that fail safe & don’t need containment buildings. Why would we stick to building designs that are 70 years out of date?
It's because every time safety fails, we find a way to solve that problem, and solving it costs money. Sometimes a lot of money.
So Chernobyl absolutely confirmed that containment buildings are not optional. Fukushima resulted in increased requirements for availability of backup power in case of a disaster.
Solar and wind don't really have that, because if a wind turbine falls apart in a hurricane, it's not really significantly different from any other random structure doing the same thing. Being killed by a chunk of turbine blade in a hurricane is not different from being killed by a chunk of a house, and in general not very likely because they rarely have people living right next to them. So we don't demand that wind turbines can survive anything nature can throw at it.