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What is significant here is that the NRC has approved a design, rather than a single plant. Nuclear plants in the US have been traditionally built like airport

What is significant here is that the NRC has approved a design, rather than a single plant. Nuclear plants in the US have been traditionally built like airports, each one bespoke to its site, each one separately assessed for safety. This pushes the plants to be very large, to offset the high up-front costs. We should build reactors like airplanes instead of airports. You get your airplane design and factory approved, then you can churn out thousands. That's the hope for microreactors. I learned about these ideas from this podcast episode: https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21155995/jessica-lovering-nuclear-energy https://www.vox.com/2020/2/28/21155995/jessica-lovering-nucl...

Krasnol 6y ago
> We should build reactors like airplanes instead of airports. You get your airplane design and factory approved, then you can churn out thousands. That's the hope for microreactors. Good there are some people with a sense of safety and this is not the case. A nuclear reactor is not a plane. Maybe you should question the opinion of a lobbyist first before you start repeating their ads.
- kiddico 6y ago
  Of course, modern planes, known for their constant crashing and terrible safety standards.
  - Krasnol 6y ago
    Modern bikes are also not know for terrible safety standards. I wouldn't compare them to a car or a plane or a NUCLEAR REACTOR. You'd assume this board is full of people with some technical understanding but somehow every single time nuclear comes up, this thing turns into some kind of 9gag.
  - manicdee 6y ago
    Every safety standard that modern aircraft have to meet is written in blood. Even then, Boeing thought they were better than they are, and we have lives lost to 737 MAX because they tried to play the rules to get a completely new aircraft certified as an existing one. The reason we don't have planes constantly crashing is because if a serious problem is found we can stop the planes flying, grounding the entire fleet of that model/variant around the world because airlines know that they'll be taken to the cleaners by governments if they keep flying a known-dangerous plane. Companies everywhere are placing profits ahead of safety and reliability. You order parts for a nuclear reactor that have to be made out of a specific alloy due to radiation, the contractor ends up giving you a slightly different alloy that is just as strong mechanically, but costs them 20% less, and it turns out that the bit they removed is the trace material that makes the specified alloy radiation resistant (they're casting contractors, not metallurgists). But because we're all cutting costs you're certifying the factory not the part, so you end up shipping a thousand small nuclear reactors with coolant systems that perish due to radiation and end up leaking toxic radioactive waste two or three years after being powered up. How do you ground a fleet of nuclear reactors? It's not like having a fridge or hot water is a luxury that we can just do without for a few months while the problem is resolved.
    - belorn 6y ago
      > How do you ground a fleet of nuclear reactors? It's not like having a fridge or hot water is a luxury that we can just do without for a few months while the problem is resolved. Is there a reason why backup solutions are not the answer to that problem?
      - manicdee 6y ago
        The aim of small nuclear reactors is to be "safe" and "reliable" so the chances are the states that switch their electricity supply to small reactors aren't going to have lots of backup power. We don't have significant backup power as it is, because we're not expecting all our power plants to fail on the same day. On the other hand states that use nuclear to supplement a "hydrogen economy" powered mostly by renewables (typical plan is 500% over-production with surplus converted to ammonia for shipping) will already have heaps of backup power and the nuclear plants would be redundant anyway. So either you only have nuclear, and most of it will be the same thing because that's how it got cheap enough to use, and when the fleet is grounded you're screwed — or you have enough "backup" power that you never needed the nuclear reactors anyway and the government of the day takes the opportunity to shut down your white elephant project which was only ever intended to funnel public funds into your colleague's pockets anyway. I don't honestly believe there is a middle ground where nuclear is selected as a supplement to renewables by a government that isn't corrupted.

Krasnol 6y ago

> We should build reactors like airplanes instead of airports. You get your airplane design and factory approved, then you can churn out thousands. That's the hope for microreactors. Good there are some people with a sense of safety and this is not the case. A nuclear reactor is not a plane. Maybe you should question the opinion of a lobbyist first before you start repeating their ads.

kiddico 6y ago
Of course, modern planes, known for their constant crashing and terrible safety standards.
- Krasnol 6y ago
  Modern bikes are also not know for terrible safety standards. I wouldn't compare them to a car or a plane or a NUCLEAR REACTOR. You'd assume this board is full of people with some technical understanding but somehow every single time nuclear comes up, this thing turns into some kind of 9gag.
- manicdee 6y ago
  Every safety standard that modern aircraft have to meet is written in blood. Even then, Boeing thought they were better than they are, and we have lives lost to 737 MAX because they tried to play the rules to get a completely new aircraft certified as an existing one. The reason we don't have planes constantly crashing is because if a serious problem is found we can stop the planes flying, grounding the entire fleet of that model/variant around the world because airlines know that they'll be taken to the cleaners by governments if they keep flying a known-dangerous plane. Companies everywhere are placing profits ahead of safety and reliability. You order parts for a nuclear reactor that have to be made out of a specific alloy due to radiation, the contractor ends up giving you a slightly different alloy that is just as strong mechanically, but costs them 20% less, and it turns out that the bit they removed is the trace material that makes the specified alloy radiation resistant (they're casting contractors, not metallurgists). But because we're all cutting costs you're certifying the factory not the part, so you end up shipping a thousand small nuclear reactors with coolant systems that perish due to radiation and end up leaking toxic radioactive waste two or three years after being powered up. How do you ground a fleet of nuclear reactors? It's not like having a fridge or hot water is a luxury that we can just do without for a few months while the problem is resolved.
  - belorn 6y ago
    > How do you ground a fleet of nuclear reactors? It's not like having a fridge or hot water is a luxury that we can just do without for a few months while the problem is resolved. Is there a reason why backup solutions are not the answer to that problem?
    - manicdee 6y ago
      The aim of small nuclear reactors is to be "safe" and "reliable" so the chances are the states that switch their electricity supply to small reactors aren't going to have lots of backup power. We don't have significant backup power as it is, because we're not expecting all our power plants to fail on the same day. On the other hand states that use nuclear to supplement a "hydrogen economy" powered mostly by renewables (typical plan is 500% over-production with surplus converted to ammonia for shipping) will already have heaps of backup power and the nuclear plants would be redundant anyway. So either you only have nuclear, and most of it will be the same thing because that's how it got cheap enough to use, and when the fleet is grounded you're screwed — or you have enough "backup" power that you never needed the nuclear reactors anyway and the government of the day takes the opportunity to shut down your white elephant project which was only ever intended to funnel public funds into your colleague's pockets anyway. I don't honestly believe there is a middle ground where nuclear is selected as a supplement to renewables by a government that isn't corrupted.