I suppose this is timely given the tragedy in Japan at the moment, but this query is just co-incidental.
I've got a region that could do with nuclear power. But I'm a conservative player and the thought of the plant and city going into meltdown doesn't appeal to me. I know we can mitigate the risk of most items in the game through water, fire, police etc. How does one mitigate against the risk of the nuclear plant going into meltdown?
If you're going to build a nuke plant, keep it far away from urbanized areas and fault lines.
Also, keep in mind new plants are much, much safer than older ones, so if you're building one today, it's fine.
I'm not sure how many nuke plants there are custom-content wise, but there may be designs that use various reactor types. The default in SC4 is a light water reactor with cooling towers. Other reactor types such as CANDU reactors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor)are safer, but they require heavy water and thus need to be placed on the edge of a large water body (like a lake).
Anyways hope you found this info useful! Good luck with your plans! :thumbsup:
I think a nuclear power station blows only when it's condition drops to 0. But since this has never happened with me, I can't be absolutely sure ;D
If you are going to built nuclear fission power plants, always place them far from your Sims. Also always build a police department and a fire station just next to them, so riots and fires will not set in danger the plant, and make sure that all of them are well funded. Also if the plants are going older and your adviser warns your about getting old, replace them as soon as possible.
To be honest however, I'll recommend you to build something safer. How about a nuclear fusion power plant? ;D
I use a Nuclear Power Plant from the STEX which uses "different" types (They use the model from the default Maxis plant) of reactors from different manufacturers and reliabilities (the least reliable of which is a cold-war USSR one, surprise, surprise) by Cogeo here (http://www.simtropolis.com/forum/files/file/12299-real-world-nuclear-power-plant-set/), but only in one city.
They've got a larger footprint than the default plant and are significantly more expensive, but they produce nutty amounts of power. One of the §500,000 Westinghouse ones can provide power for nearly 300,000 sims at about 99% capacity and are much more worth the risk.
But, to the topic at hand ( :P ) I've largely avoided the use of Nuclear plants personally, I prefer to go with a very large "Clean Coal" plant by Carrot66 I think on the STEX. Nice BAT, appalling LOD ( :P ) and I think it produces around the same power as the Maxis Nuclear plant.
If you've got Fission unlocked, I'll say go that all the way.
I admit that I don't really do nuclear in my cities. I've had too many bad things happen in earlier installments of the game (SC1 and SC3k). You know, I always thought the nuclear meltdown was scenario-only in the classic game (Where did scenarios go, anyway?), but then it happened to me in a real city on that game. It was clear out of the blue, too, with no brownouts and no other disaster leading up to the event. I lost a lot of hard work over a nuclear meltdown on 3000 once, too. I guess I could start building them again in SC4, but I mainly use a system of various power-generating substations (because there really shouldn't be a power plant every 4 km IMHO) and the Hardun Coal Power Plant by SG. I can't recall building the Maxis nuke (or any other one) even one time in SC4. I guess the best thing to do if you choose to build a nuke is to place it in a city quad with a low population if possible. There won't be as high of a risk of fire or rioting, and even if something goes wrong, the radiation will only affect that quad (if only it worked this way IRL). You'll have to make neighbor connections with power lines to transmit the power from the nuclear plant to your population centers, and you'll still have to keep an eye on the plant's condition, but at least you won't lose much if it blows up.
I modded a nuclear plant on the stex to produce 1.2m watts of electricity (its the russian one... vvr-100 or something like that). I then place it in a tile where I plan to do no building, and then use carefully placed neighbour deals to carry the power across the region so I have no need for any other power plant (typically). It works perfectly every time. I should note however I am a sandbox player and use demand modifiers and each city starts with 1b dollars ( $%Grinno$%)... so the cost of the neighbour deals are easy to swallow.