Small Modular Reactors are misnamed. Not just that the word "Nuclear" is missing, but that's true too. They should be called Slightly Smaller And Less Efficient Nuclear Reactors (SSALENRs). There is nothing "modular" to them — at least not yet (and probably never).
"Modular" refers to the idea that so many of them will be built, that they'll be coming off an assembly line like cars do. But
not one has been built, and it's pretty much guaranteed that the first few designs that they start to "mass-produce" will be changed and tweaked many times before — and if — they ever reach the assembly-line stage of development.
They are called "small" so that the public will accept them as not being the ridiculous behemoths like a typical large nuclear reactor — a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) or a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR).
The claim of the SMR community is that without a huge dome and hundreds of employees maintaining everything (and hundreds more during fuel swaps every 18 months to two years or so), these "Small" nuclear reactors will be cheaper to build, cheaper to run, and somehow easier to dispose of.
But the reality is completely different. All SMR designs are invariably quite large, extremely complex, completely inefficient, totally non-existent, extremely dangerous, highly toxic, and — ultimately — unneeded.
Below is one of dozens of new SMR designs. This one is being promoted by a company in Canada that acquired the design from another company (that was probably glad to get rid of it!).
Looks
complicated, doesn't it?
That's because it is.
Not shown is the turbine, the switchyard, the steam generators (assuming it's a PWR). No control room, either by design (operated "remotely") or operated entirely by "AI" (as if reliable AI exists). The reactor design shown above is called a "Stable Salt Reactor - Wasteburner (SSR-W), a molten salt fast reactor technology using recycled nuclear waste as fuel."
If that sounds simple, I have a bridge to sell you — no rivets!
The SSR-W, like all SMRs, will require a spent reactor fuel reprocessing system, which would be complex, dirty, and expensive.
Molten salt is not stable: It's explosive in air. So ANY leak of this design is liable to be catastrophic (which is why molten salt reactors aren't a thing, despite numerous attempts at large-scale molten salt reactors over the years).
This reactor design also has additional "molten salt fuel in arrays of standard fuel pins" surrounded by the molten salt primary coolant, which is hardly a very detailed description. The process of manufacturing the "fuel pellets" after "reprocessing" the spent fuel from other reactors is bound to be a very dangerous (and dirty). So-called "reprocessing" of spent fuel results in additional highly toxic waste streams of fission products and a deadly rainbow of toxic chemical waste products.
And all this won't have hundreds of people maintaining it, or so we're promised. In other words, maintenance will be minimal, despite the complexity and newness of the design.
Once used, the reactor will be radioactive, without sufficient containment, too radioactive to move safely anywhere, and all the steel and other components will also be radioactive, the metal will be unusable for anything else (including another reactor), and a lot of money will have been wasted (once again).
Like all SMRs, it's all just so much hype. Shown below are numerous attempts at other "small" reactors. Most were complete failures, all produce nuclear waste, none have ever been "cost-effective" and none ever can be, since wind and solar energy is so cheap in comparison to any SMR, PWR or BWR (hydro is even cheaper where it's available).
Ace Hoffman, Carlsbad, California USA
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Contact information for the author of this newsletter:
Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, California USA
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download:
acehoffman.org
Blog:
acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube:
youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Email: ace [at]
acehoffman.org
Founder & Owner,
The Animated Software Company
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