Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval

Small nuclear reactors: tiny NuScale reactor gets safety approval
popularmechanics.com

edit: and https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/first-modular-nuclea..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24345288

https://nuclear.mcmaster.ca/facility/nuclear-reactor/

> Three Mile Island

Was handled reasonably well, resulted in safety improvements to procedures and designs for future reactors.

From https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3...

> The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area's natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year for the area. The accident's maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem above background.

Not exactly the end of the world.

> Chernobyl

Accident caused by Communists who did not care about what happened to Ukrainians, as usual for them, and experimented with something that any nuclear physicist could have told them was a terrible idea. This is like blaming vehicles and calling them unsafe after reaching over from the passenger seat and yanking the wheel to drive a truck into a crowd. The moral of the story here is to keep Communists away from anything important, which applies to farms, industrial sectors, food distribution, and really most things more complicated than a pitchfork or a torch.

> Fukushima

Was reasonably safe for its long life, but they cheaped out on the necessary wall and drainage functionality; should probably have been decomm'd and replaced before this happened.

The problem in the nuclear industry is that anti-nuclear people like you form public opinion that causes it to be difficult for it to move forward. New plants based on newer designs are orders of magnitude safer - e.g. the CANDU Canadian reactor which is more fail-safe than most, and the push towards 4th generation reactors.

Get out of the way and let the planet have a clean base load energy source, or be sitting here bitching about carbon footprints 50 years from now when it should be a solved problem already.