What people don't understand is there has been literally decades of nuclear power generation over hundreds of reactors worldwide with zero issues.
I’d say the current state of American infrastructure, with our collapsing highways and constantly derailing trains that poison entire towns, would suggest otherwise.
From some admittedly quick research, there are apparently 600,000 road bridges in the US, and the continued maintenance of these bridges is dispersed between 50 different state governments. The US 140,000 miles of railroad track that transports 61 tons of goods per American per year. The scale of the size and use of road and rail systems in the United States are off the charts massive. This is not to excuse the issues you're referring to (they are real and they should definitely be fixed), but the context in which these issues are occurring is important when comparing to something like nuclear.
And it's not like it's all bad when it comes to massive infrastructure in the US: 1.7 million people fly in the US every day, and the last fatal crash on a commercial airlines occurred in 2009. It's actually kind of mindblowing that flying in the US right now is probably the safest mode of transport.. ever? Clearly the US is capable of regulating _some_ things well from a safety perspective.
So.. there are only 92 active nuclear reactors in the United States, all of which are regulated under a single independent agency of the US federal government (the NRC). It's a much smaller, more tractable problem than general transportation infrastructure.
The worst accident occurred in 1979 and the total amount of deaths in the US caused by the industry are vanishingly small compared to so many other industries (even if you use the worst estimates from the TMI accident). The regulations and associated costs surrounding nuclear are such that we have fewer reactors now than we had in 1990. And the designs and technology of nuclear reactors continues to be improvements upon (what happened at Chernobyl specifically is basically not possible anywhere in the world besides the Russia).
I just don't think it really makes sense to cast into doubt the entirety of the US government's ability to keep people safe at all (including from scary things like nuclear) just because we are seeing _some_ things go wrong at times (and I say this as someone who does in fact have very little faith in the efficacy for the US government generally speaking). Context and historical performance matter.
This is comparable to the North Sea flood [1] with 2,551 instant deaths.
> This rate is almost completely dominated by one event: the Banqiao Dam Failure in China in 1975. It killed approximately 171,000 people. Otherwise, hydropower was very safe, with a death rate of just 0.04 deaths per TWh – comparable to nuclear, solar, and wind.
The Banqiao Dam failure had much more to do the 1970s Chinese Communist Party incompetence and the Cultural Revolution than anything specific to water power.
The requirements are rarely for more than a few hours or a day or two of storage, which significantly reduces the required reservoir volume. And the only requirement is that it be at a higher elevation than the source body of water, so rather than disrupt an entire river and its migration patterns you can have it off to the side.
Because the sites are now a lot smaller and not limited to drops in elevation along rivers, you now have many possible sites; many pumped storage sites are either existing reservoirs or disused mines.
That’s one of the main issues right there. You can’t just plan for the typical case. You need to account for the slightly less frequent cases as well, like 11 days straight of <20% solar/wind generation [1]. And that’s not even an extreme outlier event.
[1] https://reports.electricinsights.co.uk/q1-2021/when-the-wind...
Because a simple cycle combustion turbine power plant is maybe 5% of the cost per watt of capacity of a nuclear power plant, we could cover the entire grid with CT backup and not come anywhere close to the cost of powering the grid with nuclear. And because these would be used so infrequently the fuel cost would be negligible.
This doesn’t sound accurate.
If you have a reservoir with zero head you can’t recover potential energy because there is not.
https://www.whitepinepumpedstorage.com/
You can see from the image how small the reservoirs are (go to Google Maps and find the spot north of Ely up the valley; it's eye opening how tiny this all is compared the size of the state of Nevada). The initial charge is 5,500 acre-feet of water (and 600 acre-feet per year makeup water, I presume for evaporation). It stores 8 GWh of energy with a power capacity of 1 GW. The estimated economic lifespan is 75 years (conservative, since very few PHES systems worldwide have been retired.) Cost is $2.5B.
The Basin and Range province has an embarrassingly large potential for pumped hydro, due to the geography: all those intermixed linear mountain ranges and valleys. This province is also where UAMPS is trying to get utilities to buy into that cluster of six NuScale reactors. Utterly dumb, when they have practically unlimited storage at a shade over $300/kWh of capacity and could use renewables instead. Utah also has the potential for enormous hydrogen storage in Miocene salt formations near Delta (~15 TWh).
The pumped hydro projects do seem to have long build times; it would be interesting to know why that was. This one is not projected to come online until 2031. The company has 11 projects in the pipeline.
It appears to be second in death toll among renewables, after biomass.
> Solar: In an average year nobody would die – only every 50 years would someone die.
It’s like saying Chernobyl only caused 32 deaths because the other ones were outside the plant.