Submitted on August 20th, 2007 by InterestedReader
Well, yes, I agree with some of the core statements here.
The current French production model put in place by AREVA (the quasi privatised verion of Cogema / Framatom - the pubicly owned nucelar engineering entities in France in the 70's and 80's). They have done a really good job in cookie cutter development of their plant, to the extent that they actually benefit from economies of scale - notoriously disfficult in the power industry of any kind and esepcially in nuclear, plus they manage to extensively test and build out the most obvious bugs from the system while upgrading the technology continually so these systems are very robust indeed from a safety perspective. Nuclear power operation is (or should be) a bit like working in space - safety based operational procedures are pretty much the basis of how a good plant operates (I suspect this is also true here) which is why there are so few major mistakes compared to gas / coal or refineries.
It is interesting to extrapolate - AREVA is actually based on 25 years of government operation and govt financed systems development, so too for space exploration etc. It is a point for reflection to wonder if in fact this is a safer development process for such technologies than leaving them to pure profit driven entities - after all it would be easy to architect a nuclear power plant that works with far less safety systems than included in most of them today - and they could be hugely profitable - but would that be acceptable?
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Nucelar Power is Green..... safety and scale issues
Submitted on August 20th, 2007 by InterestedReaderWell, yes, I agree with some of the core statements here.
The current French production model put in place by AREVA (the quasi privatised verion of Cogema / Framatom - the pubicly owned nucelar engineering entities in France in the 70's and 80's). They have done a really good job in cookie cutter development of their plant, to the extent that they actually benefit from economies of scale - notoriously disfficult in the power industry of any kind and esepcially in nuclear, plus they manage to extensively test and build out the most obvious bugs from the system while upgrading the technology continually so these systems are very robust indeed from a safety perspective. Nuclear power operation is (or should be) a bit like working in space - safety based operational procedures are pretty much the basis of how a good plant operates (I suspect this is also true here) which is why there are so few major mistakes compared to gas / coal or refineries.
It is interesting to extrapolate - AREVA is actually based on 25 years of government operation and govt financed systems development, so too for space exploration etc. It is a point for reflection to wonder if in fact this is a safer development process for such technologies than leaving them to pure profit driven entities - after all it would be easy to architect a nuclear power plant that works with far less safety systems than included in most of them today - and they could be hugely profitable - but would that be acceptable?
Joseph