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Unlikely, that would imply a major breakdown of civilization. They are all connected to power lines, else they would not have been installed in the first place.
by samus 3y ago
Unlikely, that would imply a major breakdown of civilization. They are all connected to power lines, else they would not have been installed in the first place.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoWell yes, major breakdowns of civilization have happened before and will happen again. There's one going on right now on the Ukraine/Russia border !
- samus 3y agoAnd we saw what happens when nuclear installations are caught behind frontlines. In such situations, installations composed of SMRs would have advantages. For example, artillery blowing one up would be quite gnarly still, but less so than if that happened to a much larger monolithic plant!
- gambiting 3y agoI mean during cold war many RTGs were deployed in remote regions of the world and subsequently lost. We even know of some cases where random people came across them and opened them up(unknowingly killing themselves in the process).
- samus 3y agoSMR won't deployed to remote locations and then forgotten though. They will be installed and managed like usual nuclear installations: at dedicated sites, with appropriate security, and close supervision. Their purpose is to make these installations more modular and thus cheaper to maintain, extend, upgrade, and ultimately to decommission.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoAnd yet before this I kept seeing publications about how they can be packed in a few containers/trailers and delivered anywhere to start producing heat/power... I guess it might have been about a different company, but you can understand my worries ? Also comes to mind the previous recklessness of some : while the USA has judged the use of "full blown" nuclear reactors in space too dangerous, the USSR launched 33 of them, 3 of which accidentally fell back to Earth, one contaminating a chunk of Canada. They even seemed to have kept launching them after Chernobyl, though that might have been inertia ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A
- samus 3y agoJust because it could be deployed almost anywhere, doesn't mean it will. Just like with rental housing containers that could be ordered to be shipped anywhere a road leads to. We will likely see more nuclear installations though due to the fact that they don't have to be gargantuan to scale with the engineering costs. But they will be subject to the same regulatory regime that governs the existing installations.