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Comment by chefkoch | Hacker News Reader

> We have a PROVEN solution ready to go that can be deployed in literally 10-15 years. We just need to end the ignorance.

No we don't. We don't have even one new Gen reactor running and even more important we don't have the people educated to build them in a massive scale.

It would take at least ten years to educate the nuclear engineers needed to build dozens or even hundreds of them. And even then they don't have experience, they are juniors building very complex multi billion dollar installations.

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It’s frustrating that the anti-nuclear folks (perhaps not you specifically, parent) worked to drain western societies of nuclear experience and advancement, and then use that inexperience and associated costs as a reason not to invest in nuclear.

Yes, nuclear has a long lead time, but so does economics grid-scale storage for renewables. “Long lead time” isn’t an excuse to forestall investment, it’s a reason to start now.

Moreover, nuclear has promising solutions for criticisms of cost, safety, and experience: Small Nuclear Reactors. A relatively small number of nuclear engineers can design blueprints for nuclear facilities which can be mass produced and shipped to site. The cost projections seem very favorable and certainly worth looking into more, but the biggest obstacle is anti-nuclear FUD. I’m not asking the anti-nuclear folks to help, but I do wish they would get out of the way so everyone else can save our planet.

This is true.

Also the most efficient and safe reactors are arguably in the bellies of the leading edge Submarines. It's no surprise France is going all in on the Small Modular Reactor tech since they are rumored to possess some of the best in the world already. Likely a question of declassification.

The reactor at MIT has students allowed to run parts of the operation after they pass a few strenuous tests. This hypothetical scenario where the political will is ready to go and the skill gap is what is holding it up is imaginary.

Military reactors tend to use weapons grade fuel. Would not want to spread that across all unstable regions of the world. So quite the different beasts compared to the civilian side.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070209223424/http://www.nti.or...

> It would take at least ten years to educate the nuclear engineers needed to build dozens or even hundreds of them. And even then they don't have experience, they are juniors building very complex multi billion dollar installations.

How did they do it in the past then? The first power station opened in 1956 when the technology was secretive and when there was no internet. The real problem looks completely because of red tape and NIMBY

Edit: You are also misinformed, there are Gen III reactors in operation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/APR-1400

As i said to another commenter, you are right, i was thinking of Gen III+ like EPR.

When we started out building nuclear plants the where much simpler, much smaller designs and a lot of designs didn't work out the way hoped. Nuclear is hard, it's hard on the materials and often you problems appear while building or running it.

Define "we" and "running". While the US nuclear industry is admittedly a bit moribund at the moment, there are already many gen 3 plants in operation with passive safety features, and several gen 4 in late research and plans to build commercial plants. But the majority of plants in operation are gen 2. We could be doing so much better by just building out gen 3/3.5 plants today.

The big 3 nuclear disasters, Chernobyl (started construction in 1972), Three Mile ('67), and Fukushima ('67), were al really early gen 2, designed in the 60s.

> We don't have even one new Gen reactor running

Which is the generation is the "new" one?

There are a number of Generation III ones running:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor

Gen IV reactor used to burn up plutonium:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor

You are right, i was thinking of Gen III+ like EPR.

There are EPR reactors connected to grids:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taishan_Nuclear_Power_Plant

Other Gen III+ reactors:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novovoronezh_Nuclear_Power_Pla...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generat...

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