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First Nuclear Power Plant Planned In Jordan
jones_supa writes Jordan has signed an agreement with Russia's state-owned nuclear power giant Rosatom, that sets the legal basis for building the kingdom's first nuclear power plant with a total capacity of 2,000 MW. The agreement is worth $10 billion and it envisages the construction of a two-unit power plant at Amra in the north of the kingdom by 2022. The deal provides for a feasibility study, site evaluation process and an environmental impact assessment. Currently Jordan imports nearly 98% of its energy from oil products and crude and is struggling to meet electricity demand, which is growing by more than 7% annually due to a rising population and industrial expansion. The kingdom hopes that eventually nuclear power could provide almost 40% of its total electricity generating capacity.
Seems to me cooling might be an issue in an already water poor area of the world.
Jordan has access to enough water. Just because it's in the middle east doesn't mean it's a desert. Power plants go near population centers, and population centers exist near water. Even more importantly, there's a difference between "drinking water," with all of its sanitation, distribution, and monitoring needs, and just plain "water," which can be found in any lake. Heck, lots of power plants have man-made lakes to supply that water.
But you're missing the real point. Modern nuclear plants don't need that much water. The Fukushima reactor is the oldest design there is, and its dependency on water is one of the reasons it's no longer used. Passive cooling towers (the big bong-looking cement things that we associate with nuclear plants, but which can also be used on other non-nuclear plants) massively reduce the water requirements of a nuclear plant, and are almost certainly what would be used.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
If you run it for 60 years, all you do is charge something like 1/10th of a center per kwh for 'decommissioning costs'.
2GW should produce about 15.8B kWh a year. Even excluding interest, that's $15.8M/year, $946M over 60.
If you figure that it earns 5%, that's $3.7B in 60 years, or $185M they can spend each year indefinitely doing whatever it takes to decommission it.
I don't read AC A human right
That's an infitnite liability problem, not a nuclear power problem. In a world where anyone can sue anyone for anything, real, imaginary, legal or illegal, nuclear power is the ultimate source of income for lawyers. Roughly a quarter of the cost of nuclear power in the US stems directly or indirectly from paying lawyers to go away. Think about that, they've made billions extorting everyone involved in nuclear power, and you're paying for it in every power bill, and your children are paying for It in every degree of climate change and cm of sea level rise.
Jordan, being a benevolent dictatorship, is in a much more viable position to use nuclear power than any country in a lawyer-controlled oligarchy. Note how many MPs and American senators are lawyers.