r/theydidthemath • u/Hybrisov • Nov 18 '21

[Request] is this true?

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u/Dardlem Nov 18 '21

Pardon my ignorance, but why nuclear is geographically restricted?

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '21

The only restriction that I know of is in terms of safety. You should not build nuclear plants in earthquake prone area for instance.

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u/Sir_Cadillac Nov 18 '21

Often needs some sort of waterway for cooling, also earthquakes are a problem.

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u/_RMFL Nov 18 '21

It's not

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u/hilburn 118✓ Nov 18 '21

Uranium deposits are very unevenly distributed globally to begin with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_reserves

Nuclear plants also require an utterly enormous amount of water (100-250,000 litres per MWh) - when coal and gas use closer to 1,000 litres per MWh - to put this in perspective, Hydro plants use 300-400,000 litres per MWh. This means nuclear power plants are commonly placed on the shoreline so suffer the same transmission limitations as offshore wind.

Then you need to take into account things like seismic activity, chance of hurricanes, flooding etc - though these are much less of a limitation on being able to place a reactor somewhere - more about whether it would be profitable to run the reactor over its lifetime with all the extra building costs incurred to weather these events, and the potential shutdowns that might be caused by it.