Trojan: the nuclear lemon

[Uraniun235]

Trojan was a nuclear power plant that began operating in Oregon in 1975, and was permanently shut down in 1992 (after only seventeen years of operation!) after developing the last of a series of serious malfunctions. From the sources I've immediately found on the internet (link, and more severely biased link) the various problems which plagued Trojan throughout its life seem to have been a result of manufacturing faults by Bechtel and Westinghouse, and possibly poor choices made by PGE as well.

It seems to me (although I could be wrong) that Trojan was basically the equivalent of a lemon; it seems unlikely that problems of this sort are the norm, or else it would be infeasible for nuclear power to provide as much electricity as it does today. The problem is that Trojan happened in the very worst possible place; it was already highly unpopular with the rabidly anti-nuclear hippies in the area, and the faults that developed in Trojan only served to vindicate their activism.

In talking with my friends I'm usually able to get them to agree that nuclear power is generally a good idea, but I'm concerned that if I shoot my mouth off about it in a more public environment, someone's going to bring up Trojan and not be able to look past that. I'd really like to have the best possible response known to me before that happens.

Is the concept of Trojan merely being a lemon, an exception to the generally trouble-free performance of nuclear power in the Western world, the best approach? Is there a better argument, or a problem with the lemon idea? Your input is appreciated.


(I know that the links aren't exactly the best as sources of information, but they're at least a good indicator as to the memory that plenty of older Oregonians have of Trojan.)

[Darth Wong]

Any idea can be horribly executed. But one must ask the question: how much destruction has this "lemon" plant caused? We all know in advance that the answer will be "nothing measurable", so the worst one can say about it is tha they wasted a lot of money mismanaging the operation. Well colour me shocked, but guess what: that happens all the time in industry. It doesn't mean that a whole class of technology is bad.

Having said that, I'm not a fan of American nuclear power plant designs. They require uranium which is enriched to a much higher grade than Canadian nukes do, and if we intend to switch the industrialized nations over to a less oil-intensive economy in the next 50 years, we should ask ourselves whether we want huge numbers of nuclear plants being built which all require a very high grade of uranium fuel.