Wikipedia:Peer review/Nuclear power/archive1

Nuclear power
I've listed this article for peer review because I would like to bring it to GA. I recently reorganized and cleaned up the article, and I would appreciate suggestions on how to improve it further. This is a very important topic and the article receives over 1,000 visits per day.

Thanks, Ita140188 (talk) 06:14, 29 August 2018 (UTC)

Comment from philly_boy92

The lead of an article should generally avoid citations, per WP:LEADCITE. It is assumed that the contents of the lead are a summary of the contents of the article - not new information. You should remove non-controversial the citations from there and put them further down. If there is a controversy with something in the lead, you should be able to point people to the appropriate citation in the main text, or if not remove it from the lead. There are currently 24 references in the lead. There are also number of bare URLs or improperly cited sources in the article, like 1, 43, 69, and 95. You could maybe start by fixing those, since they are easy fixes. --Michail (blah) 16:23, 8 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comment. I cleaned up the lead removing unnecessary or duplicated references, however I left references for potentially controversial statements. There are now only 7 references left in the lead. I also started to cleanup other references, but this would take some time. Ideally they should all use the cite templates. In the meanwhile if you have any other comment it would be very helpful. --Ita140188 (talk) 00:51, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Not your fault obviously and perhaps a problem with wikis generally but I feel the main problem is that the article lacks coherence and that similar points are repeated in different places - presumably different pro and anti nuclear campaigners have edited it over the years.

Suggest you:

Make article more organised and shorten it partly by removing or summarising repetitive points.

remove update or summarize some old numbers

add info on and link to Small modular reactors

update economics section for SMR and current figures for "firm power" wind, solar and carbon price (e.g. EU China and UK) or zero emission credits (some places in US). More info on the economics of extending lifetimes of existing nuclear plants. What will happen if President Trump is defeated next election and US introduces a carbon price? Cross border tariffs on carbon content of electricity - Economist mag says no but could it happen?

perhaps ideas for updates in http://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Future-of-Nuclear-Energy-in-a-Carbon-Constrained-World.pdf and https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20180902wnisr2018-hr.pdf

Chidgk1 (talk) 16:58, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Might there be any studies on sensible criteria to use when deciding whether to keep old plants running e.g. safety versus carbon emissions? It seems illogical that Japanese plants have been shut whereas the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant is still running. Surely it should be the other way around. Presumably some political influences? Chidgk1 (talk) 07:50, 27 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comments. I agree that many points can be summarized and the article can be made clearer and with less repetitions. I am also surprised there was no discussion or link to SMRs. I will work on the article as suggested as soon as I have time. As for the decision to keep a plant running, these are mostly up to each country. Japan has extremely strict safety requirements for nuclear power plants, that were further updated and made stricter after Fukushima. It should be noted that all the 40+ reactors in Japan that were operating during the earthquake in 2011 safely shut down and did not suffer any accident due to the earthquake itself (the third largest earthquake ever registered in history). It was the tsunami that caused the crisis. The least safe and oldest of the Japanese reactors that was shut down after 2011 was way way safer than the Armenian Nuclear Power Plant. --Ita140188 (talk) 16:24, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

I made some editing to the article. I think that the following issues need to be addressed before this could become a Good Article:
 * The History section is good but too long. The text should be moved to a new article titled History of nuclear power. Then a short summary should be written for the Nuclear power article. This would follow Wikipedia's Summary style.
 * The statistics in the sections Installed capacity and electricity production, and Economics should be updated. Some numbers there are very old.
 * In the section High-level radioactive waste, there is a sentence: "Used thorium fuel remains only a few hundreds of years radioactive, instead of tens of thousands of years." I suspect that this is false. I cannot access the reference, and I couldn't find the same information in any reliable source.
 * The Waste heat section talks about the effect of global warming on nuclear power plants. A more relevant topic would be the environmental impact of the waste heat that is generated by nuclear power plants.
 * The text in the section Comparison with renewable energy should be made shorter and moved to the section Debate on nuclear power. --TuomoS (talk) 18:23, 18 November 2018 (UTC)


 * How about adding some forecasts of world electricity demand?
 * More on extending the lifetime of older plants e.g. in UK or France?
 * I understand that nuclear plants can technically be ramped up and down to work together with variable renewable energy but how much of that would be needed for full decarbonization and what would be the economics? Presumably once the externalities of fossil fuels are correctly priced then nuclear would be competing in the firm power market with the nearest hydro, e.g. Norway in the case of UK and France, so interconnector costs would be important? To take another example: once Germany shut down their coal-fired generation will it be cheaper for them to balance their VRE with French nuclear or Norwegian hydro or existing gas-fired stations?
 * Environmentalists current views on nuclear could be updated https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2018-11-15/environmentalists-warm-to-nuclear-amid-climate-change-threat
 * "Comparison with renewable energy" maybe not a good heading as both are required according to http://news.mit.edu/2018/adding-power-choices-reduces-cost-risk-carbon-free-electricity-0906