Seeing that they need quite a lot of clean water, which is not widely available everywhere during the entire year in big amounts, especially with these droughts due to climate change.
Seeing that they need quite a lot of clean water, which is not widely available everywhere during the entire year in big amounts, especially with these droughts due to climate change.
They’re not economically feasible anywhere right now. Unfortunately nuclear power is very expensive compared to all the alternatives. Unless there’s some radical breakthrough I can’t see much nuclear being built in the future. No company would pay such a huge up-front cost to produce uneconomic electricity.
So the strict answer is - no, they’re not feasible everywhere. And also not feasible pretty much anywhere.
If anyone bothered to include externalities, nuclear is more than competitive. And a ton of the costs are purely regulatory. Sadly, the incompetence of the Soviets ruined nuclear power and likely doomed the planet.
Three Mile Island and Fukushima would like a word.
How much do you know about Three Mile Island? Fukushima was built in a stupid location, so lets not do that again. But Three Mile Island is often way over blown.
It’s public perception that is important here. That’s where the impact of Chernobyl is for building new plants. Public perception of the other events furthers doubts about the safety. It’s also easy to have hindsight about Fukushima, but it was built nonetheless.
With Three Mile Island everything that could go wrong did and it still wound up being an overblown non-issue. There have been exactly 0 environmental or health impacts due to Three Mile Island despite it being the worst nuclear disaster in US history.
Fukushima was built in a stupid location. How about we don’t build nuclear power plants on fault lines in tsunami prone areas. Literally 4 different fault lines converge on Japan, it is not a place anyone should be building nuclear power plants.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants
Yes and no. Renewables are the best, but they’re inconsistent.
The environmental impact of coal is much worse than nuclear, so nuclear is a good consistent baseline power to be supplemented by renewable generation.
The base load argument doesn’t hold water any more - not when there are places which are progressing towards being totally free of base load. Eg. South Australia is already nearly all renewable power with in-fill from batteries and transient gas power when needed. They’re still currently getting some base load from other states but it’s small and gradually being phased out.