2y ago

reactors are scary.jpg

corporate wants you to find the difference

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-small-modular-reactor-design#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Nuclear%20Regulatory%20Commission,use%20in%20the%20United%20States.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_naval_reactors

45 comments

They are Scary if you don't do any research into it to find out that the amount of scare mongering in the world right now is unjust.
- I'm pro nuclear not anti
Yes, because energy companies would never cheap out on safety for the sake of profit.
NAVSEA's safety record is 100% due to explicit, institutional anal-retentiveness. Rickover was a power tripping dick, but God damn was he effective. PG&E would shut down if they had to get ORSE'd
So, are those small modular reactors in the room with us now?
- I'm not certain what you mean by that but if you are asking how small they would be and where they would be placed the normal recommendation would be you would want a warehouse sized facility with an Olympic sized swimming pool to submerse a standard container sized reactor. You would probably house one to three reactors per facility. You would probably want an exclusion zone of 1 mi. Minimum. Depending on the model a single reactor would be able to power roughly 50,000 to 100,000 homes. Ideally you would build one of these 20 miles from a city. Plug in the SMRs and after 15 to 20 years unplug them and replace with newer models ship them off to a long-term storage facility and eventually process them for fuel once a we have functional thorium salt reactors at scale.
  
  They're saying they don't exist
I'm gonna say it!
_thorium
- Forum reactors would be cool but I'm only basing this off the difference between modern small modular pressurized water reactors vs Soviet designs from wwii
Haha yeah, those who don't agree with me must surely be stupid.
That will show them.
I know for some reason it is never popular to argue against the pro nuclear propaganda that keeps getting posted both here and on the old site, but I just hate how it tries to make anyone seem stupid that is afraid of the myriad of problems with this technology that are still unsolved to this day.
Especially considering how nuclear energy gets dominated so hard by renewables.
- I might be misunderstanding this image, but it seems anti-nuclear by suggesting even modern designs are basically as dangerous as Chernobyl's reactor. I know nothing about nuclear reactors so I have no opinion on the matter.
  
  It's saying people are too reactionary to know there's a difference.
- I didn't call you stupid I stated that anti-nuclear activists have a tendency to compare 80-year-old technology to modern technology and claim it's the same thing. If you can recognize the difference in the pictures then you're not stupid.
- the myriad of problems with this technology that are still unsolved to this day
  Like what?
  
  Cost. Simple as that.
  Nuclear power is not economically viable, never has been, probably never will. The only reason it exists are massive subsidies.
  
  Long term storage and/or reprocessing of fuel. On site storage is not a viable long term solution. We need some way to safely store expended fuel or change the rules to allow reprocessing. Commercially, we need to figure out an economical way to build power plants that doesn't die under the weight of its own regulations. Vogtle 3 & 4 went waaayy over budget, and almost bankrupted the partners (Westinghouse I believe). Solar and wind are seeing reduction in cost due to expanding market and the economy of scale that goes with it, along with generous subsidies. For nuclear to get those benefits it would have to be constructed at a rate not seen since Three Mile Island. We lost all of those benefits accrued during the 60s 70s and 80s. We would be starting at least 10 years behind wind and solar.
  
  Shut up with your facts and logic this is clearly an emotional response only zone
- We could shut down every coal fired plant and replace the coal fired apparatus with a modern reactor and keep the current steam turbine facility in place. But tell me more about how keeping Cole burning and spewing radioactive nuclei into the atmosphere as preferable than hypothetical meltdown situations.
  
  And that will take just, what, 200 years? Nuclear reactors aren't diesel engines, they take a while to build.
  Also, assuming the only option besides nuclear is coal, is stupid at best, but I'd assume, you're misleading on purpose here.
The biggest, best argument against nuclear energy is the limited fuel supply.
If the world replaced base load power with nuclear (as a nuclear plus solar plus wind energy mix) we would only have enough uranium for something like 50 years
The waste storage problem isn't worth it for so little time, but OTOH we need to solve the storage problem anyway, and 50 years of CO2 clean power would be useful for aiding decarbonising the energy supply
- spent fuel can be recycled and it isn't a terrible complex process to do so
  even if we didn't recycle spent fuel there's far more than 50 years worth left on land
  even if we ran out of land sources spent fuel there's 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in the ocean
  
  Doesn't that require breeder reactors? They're a nuclear proliferation risk, so can't really be allowed in untrusted countries
  I think the 50 year number excludes resources that are unavailable, for example an enormous uranium deposit in Australia, which cannot be extracted because the indigenous owners of the land have traditions about the area which make it untouchable
  Extracting elements from sea water is stupidly expensive
- There's far more available fuel than that. As demand grows it becomes worth finding more. Even without reprocessing and thorium, it's unlikely that running out of uranium is actually a problem.
- I am not trying to be condescending but I would very much like to know where you got your facts and figures from.

45 comments