Time for America to do the same?
Nuclear advocates would do well to keep up to date with the Indian Point decommissioning in order to propose solutions to the knottiest problem for nuclear: the plants are owned by corporations who do bad things.
If you want nuclear to prosper, there needs to be solutions to issues like a company announcing it will discharge nuclear waste into the Hudson River with no regard as to how it might affect local economies or residents.
I think nuclear energy is quite a powerful tool in our quest to decarbonize, but I have very little trust in the stewardship of for profit companies who have very little regard for the lifetimes of the materials when they live and die by the quarter (relatedly see PFAs, micro plastics, &c.).
Like I said, take a look at Indian Point. There was an uproar about releasing the nuclear waste into the river (on an accelerated timeline), an action which is now prohibited by law.
As a result, there are holding tanks full of radioactive water that no one knows what to do with and that pose a greater threat should they leak. There is public distrust for the company decommissioning the plant, and they are severely hamstrung (how _do_ they get that waste out of there when they can’t transport it anywhere?).
I should note, I’m not really looking to argue state vs non-state ownership. I’m saying that someone needs some real solutions to these types of problems before nuclear could be built at scale.
I may be a libertarian of sorts, but I'd have no problem with nuke plants being nationalized for other reasons, and if that would assuage worries about corporate malfeasance, so much the better.
Wait, what?
The Indian Point reactors 2 and 3 were decommissioned in 2020 and 2021 because of pure political reasons. For some reason Andrew Cuomo wanted them shut down.
> corporations who do bad things.
You know that governors can do bad things too, right?
The second best time to plant a tree is now.
> It takes around 6 to 8 years to build a nuclear reactor.
(Note: There is no data on planning part though; not so easy to methodically measure probably)
Point still valid, but 20 years seems excessively pessimistic.
Also keep in mind that the limited amount of data for US/UK plants are for long planned expansions. Vogtle was built to accomodate 4 reactors from the start. So Vogtle 3 & 4 should have taken considerably less time than average.
But let's be generous and say that a greenfield project takes less time to construct than Vogtle, or 10 years. Do you think planning & approvals can be done in less than 10 years?
Even the touted "small modular reactor" projects take over a decade. For example, the INL small reactor project started in 2013, kept getting delayed until it had a start date of 2030, and then was cancelled a few months ago.
And meeting demand with nuclear would require around ~200 full size reactors. 20 years to build 200 reactors sounds extremely optimistic to me.
Scaling the surface this means 200 nuclear power plants in the US. There already are 50 so another 150 to go. More chances for Fukushima / Chernobyl situations.