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NN Asks: What hurdles stand in the way of nuclear power’s global expansion?
Jake Jurewicz
Nuclear technology is mature. It provides firm power at scale with minimal externalities and has done so for decades. The core problem isn’t about the technology—it is how the plants are built. Nuclear construction has a well-documented history of cost and schedule overruns. Previous nuclear plants often spent more than twice what was first budgeted, making nuclear among the power technologies with the largest average cost overruns worldwide.
Recent projects illustrate how severe the problem can be. In South Carolina, the V.C. Summer nuclear expansion saw projected costs rise from roughly $10 billion to more than $25 billion before the project was abandoned in 2017, by which time more than $9 billion had already been spent and customers were stuck paying for a site they have yet to benefit from.
G. W. Carlson, J. W. Behrens
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 68 | Number 1 | October 1978 | Pages 128-132
Technical Note | doi.org/10.13182/NSE78-A27279
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We measured the fission cross-section ratio of 241Pu relative to 235U over the neutron energy range from 1 keV to 30 MeV at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory 100-MeV Linac. We used ionization fission chambers and the time-of-flight technique to take data simultaneously over the entire energy range, obtaining a measurement of the shape versus the neutron energy of the ratio accurate to ±2% over most of the energy range. Two independent methods determined the normalization of the shape measurement.