this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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What about the conversion of coal fired power plants to nuclear ones? I've seen that proposed quite a bit.
Wouldn't only the turbines and cooling tower be reusable? I thought the hard part was the reactor itself.
Even then I don't imagine it would be easy. Anything in a nuclear plant needs to be built to an extremely exacting standard that I'm pretty sure old coal powerplant components wouldn't be. I can't see how you could convert a coal plant into a nuclear plant without having to completely rebuild everything.
The problem with reusing coal turbines isn't that they couldn't work, but that you would have to engineer everything backwards from the turbines to the reactor. You COULD do that, but really, you should be engineering to what the current projections for the power needs to be, not the projected power needs from when the coal plant was built.
Maybe reusing the coal plant site makes sense, but only if the coal plant was already taken offline, which to be fair, a lot of plants are being taken offline.
From the little I know it's a pipe dream. Just completely different scales.