The Myth of the Nuclear Renaissance; The game is already over for nuclear energy.

[kristopher]

The Myth of the Nuclear Renaissance
The game is already over for nuclear energy.
July 18, 2016, at 2:00 p.m.


Dear editor,

Desperate times for the nuclear industry call for desperate rhetoric. Hence the reach, once again, for "renaissance," even though the facts support no such thing and the industry itself dare not even resurrect the mythological moniker. ["The New Nuclear Renaissance," 6/11/2016]

With nuclear power priced out of the market – not only by natural gas but, more importantly for climate, by renewables – die-hard nuclear proponents are dressing up old reactors in new propaganda.

Sodium-cooled, fast and even small modular reactors are all designs that have been around – and rejected – for decades.

Sodium-cooled reactors are prone to fires, explosions and super-criticality accidents. A rapid power increase inside the core of such a reactor could vaporize the fuel and blow the core apart. Far from "walk away safe," these on-paper designs have not been submitted to the kind of rigorous "all scenarios" testing that could definitively designate them as meltdown proof.

The reactor that consumes its own radioactive waste as fuel is not the waste management panacea its sounds like...

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-07-18/stop-perpetuating-the-myth-of-the-nuclear-renaissance

[yurbud]

1. the rich like the idea of nuclear because it can be monopolized and it is so complex...

it is easy to cheat taxpayers in the building and running of them.

[Fast Walker 52]

2. yet I interacted with someone here who insisted that the only way we could

be totally renewable to fight climate change was to use nuclear power. He rejected Bernie Sanders specifically because Bernie was against nuclear energy, even though Bernie seemed strongest on fighting climate change.