Hello and thank you for all these details that have taught me more about nuclear.
(by the way, very interesting the long commentary of
Bardal ! thank you for these very clear explanations.)
That being said, what I wanted to highlight through my naive question is the paradox that I perceive between:
- this energy, the nuclear power, whose capacities are phenomenal, and its equally extreme characteristics, in terms of temperatures produced, complexity of the process, the dangers involved, the waste produced, and the costs involved,
and:
- the "minimal benefits" that one derives from it, namely to heat water only a few hundred degrees, if I may say so!
By the way, do you know what temperature from a nuclear reaction is actually used to heat the water that will drive the turbines at the end of the process to produce electricity?There are some values on the internet,
of the order of 300 to 400 degrees in the primary circuit, ie the circuit whose water will directly recover the heat produced by the nuclear reaction, (
See the EDF website) ...
while the nuclear reaction is capable of producing some 15 000 000 of degrees Celsius. (We "play" with fifteen million degrees to use 300!
).
To give a trivial image, it's a bit like I used a 50 tons truck to transport a pea, and again, I have to be far from the proportions of temperatures in the nuclear process.
Well, of course, I hear the objectors remind me that "Who can do the most, can the least", but still, 400 ° it's almost the temperature of my stove when I cook the tartiflette in the oven! ... and Fortunately, every time someone misses the cooking of his tartiflette in the oven, we are still far from creating a global disaster!
It is understandable then why one must be so careful in the implementation of this energy, and why a simple grain of sand in the process (or human negligence) can create a runaway in proportions that we are difficult to control!
And if I'm not mistaken, that's what happened for Chernobyl, and it's also what we feared for Fukushima, the famous "Chinese syndrome".
To end on the analogy with the heat of the volcanoes ... certainly it is an anecdotal example, but finally and all accounts, to simply heat water to 300 ° it would surely cost less to install big turbines in the magma of a volcano than to build a nuclear power plant! And probably also cheaper to transport the electricity produced from the heat of volcanoes even if it comes from some volcanic regions located at the other end of the world!