Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors

While clearly biased and theres some wording and cherrypicking of studies (that isn't very egregious, to be clear!) that I'd take issue with in a more formal setting, the content of the article thru to point two are really quite an alright summary of the issues and raises some very valid questions the industry has yet to answer.

However it throws itself off the credibility cliff riiiiiight around this point:

In any event, regulators are loosening safety and security requirements for SMRs in ways which could cancel out any safety benefits from passive features. For example, the NRC has approved rules and procedures in recent years that provide regulatory pathways for exempting new reactors, including SMRs, from many of the protective measures that it requires for operating plants, such as a physical containment structure, an offsite emergency evacuation plan, and an exclusion zone that separates the plant from densely populated areas. It is also considering further changes that could allow SMRs to reduce the numbers of armed security personnel to protect them from terrorist attacks and highly trained operators to run them. Reducing security at SMRs is particularly worrisome, because even the safest reactors could effectively become dangerous radiological weapons if they are sabotaged by skilled attackers. Even passive safety mechanisms could be deliberately disabled.

What in the fearmongering fuck is this? "Oh no, terrorists!" And it's debunked on the first page of one of its own sources. Regulators have NOT put any pathways in place to "exempt SMRs from many of the protective measures." If you read the sources, what they have done is put in place guidelines for the evaluation of the current measures, to judge if those measures merit being re-evaluated. Its a path for a path to judge if maybe we should have a path.

And fucking hell, yes of course they would have smaller security contingents, the installations are physically smaller! There's less to guard! Thats in no small part the point!

Look there are a lot of problems with SMRs and even more questions we just don't have answers for yet. Those questions need answers before any progress can be made with SMRs. The benefits of lower transmission losses, dedicated power generation for industrial complexes being at all beneficial, or remotely finalized designs for the reactor technology needed here are all MASSIVE outstanding issues that have yet to be solved.

But this shit? "we cant have this source of green energy because terrorists!!!"

Fuck off with that.

There are more than enough issues with SMRs to justify extreme skepticism, hell microsoft wanting a bunch is probably reason enough to abandon the whole concept. We dont need to stoop to disinformation and blatant lies, what the fuck. This is why "nuclear bros" (Which great idea, lets "other" the critics, that's not a red flag at all...) get so much traction, because they dont stoop to conspiracy theory tropes to support their arguments.

The economic advantage of SMRs is that when you make reactors in a location, the 1st is always more expensive than any following reactors. Just a reality of construction, permits, designs, etc. So if you have 4 reactors in one place, that's pretty nice. They also have the advantage of being able to turn one off for maintenance and then having 2, 3, 4 other reactors in the same vicinity that can pick up the slack for the duration.

As for waste, yeah it's the same problem. But it's important to note that the volume of material is not that big. The entire volume produced by all us nuke energy ever takes up a football field stacked 10 yards high. All told, that's a smaller problem than I ever thought.

I'm not a big nuclear advocate, I'm pretty mid on it. This is where I got all of the above information, an interview with the head of the US DOE loan program https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I know nothing on the topic, but the points you raise don't seem relevant to me?

SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.

Yeah, economies of scale mean small things are generally less efficient than big things. This is a criticism of local power generation that applies just as well to wind turbines for example. Nothing to do with this idea really.

SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.

Why would anyone expect large power plants to be less safe than this? I'd expect the technology in both to be safe. Tell me if this is safe or not, not if it's "safer" than large power plants on some ambiguous scale. Rooftop solar is also less safe than commercial solar power plants just due to being located near someone's living space, but it's a useless relative comparison.

SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.

That one is the only valid point to me.

SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.

Why not? Seems like they would.

SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.

This is just a repeat of the first point.

Again, I know nothing on this and don't have an opinion either way. I'm pointing out this seems to be a criticism but only one of the 5 points seems to actually criticize this.

I though the use case was that these reactors can be mass produced in a factory and not require large scale infrastructure projects?

I appreciate this hasn't been proven but comparing apples with oranges seems odd.

My personal stance is that sustainability cannot be achieved within capitalism due to its model of eternal growth. We can have one or the other, but not both.

So creating more energy could not be the solution. Creating less demand would be, and the demand comes from industries.

More often than not, I it seems to me this discussion about clean energy is a deflection of the real problem which is industrialisation under capitalism. We don't question anymore what this energy is needed for.

Nuclear power is simply a smokescreen. It's proponents ultimately just want fossil fuel dependency to last as long as possible by promising silver bullet solutions that will never become reality, instead of focusing on solutions that exist and are effective today.