The US never built 2 nuke plants alike, indeed the plants didn’t even have 2 units alike. The long lead times for planning and construction, along with the desire to include the latest thinking/materials, led to a constant barrage of changing regulations coming from Washington. Every unit built included changes on the fly during construction.
It’s pretty obvious to scientists, inventors and auto mechanics that you don’t change more than one parameter at a time if you want to know the effect of that change. The result was no design was proven/tested over time.
France has had success with nuclear power because they standardized from the beginning. They built one design and upgraded all the plants as history and performance proved changes would be fruitful.
I don’t know what kind of effect their design or their whole program for that matter, has had on the long term health of the population but they at least haven’t blown them up.
As TW mentioned, waste is a big problem, not just spent fuels but thousands of barrels of contaminated tools, clothing and such. Imagine that every day after work you change your clothes but the ones you take off can’t be laundered, they must be stored in drums.....forever.
I may be naive but it seems to me we have all that contaminated land where they set off the nuclear tests. Why not put the waste there?
