Talk:Nuclear power plant

long-term much of the material from nuclear reactor really belongs here, but I'm not in a great hurry to move it. I'd like this to stay readable.

I hope it's reasonably NPOV. It's certainly a controversial topic! Some would say there are no advantages, but people are still building them. This list attempts to list their reasons. Others are not building them despite looming energy shortages, and the list of disadvantages attempts in turn to summarise their reasons.

I didn't put the question of waste management onto either list, although some would put it at the top of one list, and others at the top of the other! So it gets a paragraph of its own.

Interested to see how it develops. Andrewa 20:02, 26 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I edited the advantages/disadvantages list because it seemed to me to be far too pro-nuclear. No new nuclear plant has been started in the US since the Carter presidency. There is a serious political debate here and one of the problems that the nuclear industry has created for itself is constantly dismissing opponents as fringe activists.

There is a basic breakdown in trust here and I don't think that the traditional nuclear industry can rebuild it. The problem that is getting overlooked here is that the existing nuclear plants are getting old and if we are not carefull we will end up either running them well past their safe design life or worse build new ones to the old obsolete designs.

Should probably add a section on pebble bed reactors here. The new wave nuclear reactors are dramatically safer than the old and have much better answers to the problems of nuclear waste etc.

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Three new nuclear plants are on the verge of being ordered in the U.S., probably depending on how the current Energy Bill does in Congress. At least one will be an ABWR, of which three are already operating in Japan. ABWRs are about 100 times safer than the previous generation of BWRs largely because they have the recirculation pumps inside the reactor vessel and hence have no external recirculation piping. The passively-safe ESBWR and the AP1000 are even safer.

There are several locales (not among the above three) desiring new nuclear units - Oswego, NY and Port Gibson, MS for two.

I disagree with editing advantage/disadvantage lists just because they seem to be "too pro-nuclear" - each advantage/disadvantage should stand on its own merit, not someone's politics. Simesa 18:38, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

"Nuclear Power will Destroy the world someday" sounds pretty opinionated. I don't think it's very necessary to the article, nor do I think it's appropriate.

Number of reactors

Regarding this edit [1] I am not sure if the new number 443 is actually correct. According to this link [2] which says it was updated on the 4th of Jan of this year there are only 441 with several offline, 24 under construction, 41 planned, 113 proposed. I think the diffrence is that the 441 number is the number that are currently online and 443 is the number which are fully licened and could come back online, can someon verify this? Dalf | Talk 01:15, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have done a bit of research: one of the two "extra" reactors is in the US, the other is in Japan. The one in the United States (Browns Ferry 1) is not operational: it has been shut in 1985 but it is still fully licensed [3]. The one in Japan is Monju, which operated from 1994 to 1995, then was shut down due to a sodium leak in 1996 and is currently "awaiting restart" [4]. Both reactors are scheduled to resume operation sometime in 2007/8. Your assumption is correct: they are in the official IAEA list because they are licensed, so they could be legally turned on, while all other shut down reactors are unlicensed. So the numbers are both correct. I have updated the article to reflect this. Mushroom 02:45, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Cool thanks, I thought that was the case I had read about Browns Ferry in a footnote in that second link I posted, but was not sure about the other one. Dalf | Talk 03:50, 18 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]