You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap
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Bourke is a town of 4,000 people 800 kilometres (roughly 500 miles) away from Sydney. It is 370 kilometres from the nearest town of any size, Dubbo, which is a town of about 36,000 people.
I'm no electrical engineer, but even allowing for the flat terrain and lack of settlement transmission lines of that length would be a significant fraction of the cost of a power plant itself.
It would be about the equivalent of plonking a nuclear reactor halfway between Calgary and Saskatoon - a great way to deal with the NIMBY factor, but not terribly economically sensible.
More info:
Article at Wikipedia