OT: Engineering

[STLMOCAJUN]

I think the major thing going for nuclear in the US right now is basically zero carbon emissions. That is a huge thing right now for investors so companies like Entergy who runs the nuclear plants in Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana are pushing that to get huge capital investments. Also, nuclear plants provide large base loads for areas at capacity factors of over 90%. This lends to being able to not run natural gas/coal at 100% capacity which also goes back to the carbon emissions. And even though nuclear plants create waste, the waste for our plant which has been running for almost 40 years now sits on a concrete pad within our protected area. Perfectly safe and harmless to the environment. Also current plants are large job centers. My plant alone has almost 900 employees and every 2 years during our refuel outages we being in another 500-1000 contractors. This brings huge amount of business to the areas around the plant. Small modular reactors are the future of the business. Posted some wiki links of the different types of reactors.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_water_reactor

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pres..._water_reactor

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor

[STLMOCAJUN]

And the biggest con of course is the potential for meltdowns. But one thing the industry does is make changes when there is an event. After Fukushima, all US plants were tasked by the NRC to look at potential accidents beyond their design bases. The industry answer was FLEX. Plants created new ways to provide water and most importantly power to the plants. Also created were two warehouses, located in Memphis and Phoenix, that contains vast amounts of equipment to mitigate accidents that can make it to any plant within 24 hours of a declared event.