WI: More Nuclear?

What impacts might this have on the world economy and society?

Less deaths due to air pollution and mining, much less CO2 emissions as currently some 50% of CO2 emissions come from electricity generation.
With less demand on natural gas, various dictatorships would have less funds.

Also, naturally, there would have been more nuclear accidents - spectacular but with few or no casualties. This would probably mean more balanced view on nuclear accidents versus industrial accidents in general.
 
I think we can assume GE and Westinghouse looked into Thorium reactors and modular reactors and turned down the idea.

Sure, there'd already been alot of R&D done on uranium/plutonium reactors, uranium and plutonium are about the cheapest part of running a reactor (so thorium being more common makes no real difference), for France, Britain, America, China and the USSR they produce useful bomb material as a byproduct, they can burn solid fuel and they could build on the industry and supply chains already constructed for a-bomb manufacture.

If I'd been an engineer at GE, Westinghouse, ICI or a Soviet design bureau, I'd have chosen uranium/plutonium as well.

This one goes back to 1929, but it only covers household consumption.

Nice one. If I can find my book on nuclear power in the north west I could tell you exactly when the managers decided to go big on nuclear and that would ground our disagreement better.

But you are arguing all the nuclear issues from a very US centric viewpoint while the thread was started from a global viewpoint. Even though nuclear energy has had rough going in the US, the story is not similar all over the world.

In case of countries with cold climate, smaller reactors have a lot of utility for providing district heating, a concept which was already pioneered in 1960's.

I would really, really love to find a good history of the French nuclear power program.

For the Soviets it's kinda an interesting case. I think nuclear power was economic in the western USSR, where coal resources were running out and long overland train journeys made imports expensive, but part of that was because the Soviets picked a single reactor design to build as their "industrial standard" - the Chernobyl type RMBK reactors - had "issues". The Soviets were also building reactors in a terrible hurry, cutting corners during the planning phase and the building phase, were putting reactors too close to cities (good for avoiding electricity losses, bad if a reactor ever has a mishap), were using insufficiently trained manpower to oversee the plants (a big factor in things going wrong at Chernobyl). They were cutting costs at the expense of safety.

As such I don't think the Soviet approach is a great example of how to meet the OP's challenge.

fasquardon
 
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And maybe a couple more countries with nuclear weapons

Commercial nuclear power plants do not easily turn into nuclear bomb material factories. With more nuclear power (mostly in countries which operate nuclear power plants in OTL) international safeguards are likely to be even more extensive than OTL.
 
And maybe a couple more countries with nuclear weapons

The whole idea of nuclear power plants being a big step towards a bomb isn't correct.

It is a very small step to making bomb manufacture easier. But the limitations actually stopping countries from having bombs are elsewhere (bombs require devilishly precise machining and a whole lot of enrichment) - you can make nuclear weapons from U235 and skip the reactor step entirely.

fasquardon
 
The side effects of more nuclear power (and ideally innovation) is interesting too. The price of tritium, plutonium, and other related substances is lower, with benefits to various applications ranging from space exploration to medicine.

Thorium-based nuclear power will have the side effect of monazite being more commonly mined and means China probably won't have such a hold on the market of rare-earth elements.
 
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