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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: The Spanish Grid Drop-out - recently released information.
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 17:06:57 +1000
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On 15/05/2025 7:37 am, john larkin wrote:
> On Wed, 14 May 2025 21:10:06 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
> 
>> On 2025-05-14 19:19, john larkin wrote:
>>> On Tue, 13 May 2025 22:28:23 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
>>> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 2025-05-13 18:14, Bill Sloman wrote:
>>>>> On 13/05/2025 11:48 pm, john larkin wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 13 May 2025 12:57:47 +0200, "Carlos E.R."
>>>>>> <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>> Nukes are great, but not if you tear them down.
>>>>>
>>>>> Nukes are remarkably expensive, and depressingly inflexible. Radiation
>>>>> damage to the structure means that you do have to tear them down after a
>>>>> few decades of use, and the radioactive waste starts off very
>>>>> radioactive, and the longer-lived isotopes have to be managed for a few
>>>>> hundred thousand years.
>>>>
>>>> And the investors building the stations do not consider the cost of
>>>> managing the waste for centuries. They leave that part to the
>>>> government. In Spain, we don't have any long term nuclear waste storage.
>>>> I think we rent storage in France, so the waste has to be transported
>>>> there. We have some storage at each station, a large water pool.
>>>
>>> The best thing to do with used fuel rods is reprocess them into more
>>> fuel.
>>
>> Something that is expensive and not every country can do.
> 
> A couple of very remote places in the world could do that. And we'd
> get lots of fun isotopes too. Can't leave hot rods in a zillion pools
> forever.

Nobody does. Nuclear reactors are a useful source of medically useful 
isotope - Australia has just one for that job, though it is also 
exploited as a neutron source. I got interviewed for a job to upgrade 
their neutron diffraction system - they'd bough the original from France 
thirty years ago. I didn't get the job, which was a bit of a relief. In 
the 1980's I worked on a French shaped beam electron beam 
microfabricator, and hadn't been impressed by the engineering.

>>> When that's not feasible, dig a deep hole and dump it in. Or drop
>>> barrels of junk into an ocean subduction zone.
>>
>> That's simply wrong.
>>
>>> It's irrational to store nuclear waste locally. Nuke policy is mostly
>>> fear driven. And nukes are unpopular in some quarters by people who
>>> really don't want us to have affordable, safe energy.
>>
>> I have a very rational and studied fear of nuclear power.
> 
> Why?  It's very safe when done carefully.

Except when something unexpected goes wrong, as it did at Fukushima

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident

> The little modular reactors sound cool.

The US nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers have relied on them for 
decades. It's odd that there's never been a civilian version. "Sounding 
cool" doesn't get you through a design review.

The fact that those reactors rely on much more heavily enriched 
(weapons=grade) uranium that civil nuclear reactors may come into it.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney