The Rise of Small Nuclear Plants

ColdWetDog writes "The Oil Drum (one of the best sites to discuss the technical details of the Macondo Blowout) is typically focused on ramifications of petroleum use, and in particular the Peak Oil theory. They run short guest articles from time to time on various aspects of energy use and policies. Today they have an interesting article on small nuclear reactors with a refreshing amount of technical detail concerning their construction, use, and fueling. The author's major thesis: 'Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This assumption is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. Recently, however, a growing body of plant designers, utility companies, government agencies, and financial players are recognizing that smaller plants can take advantage of greater opportunities to apply lessons learned, take advantage of the engineering and tooling savings possible with higher numbers of units, and better meet customer needs in terms of capacity additions and financing. The resulting systems are a welcome addition to the nuclear power plant menu, which has previously been limited to one size — extra large.'"

Comments

Re:This is good.

[uncqual]

Nice troll.

You think we are stupid enough to buy this BS? If there was an option with this many upsides and so few downsides, we would be using it - it would just make engineering sense and political sense to get rid of coal plants (in particular) and replace them with (alleged) IFRs. And, to top it off, you expect us to believe that the US would waste resources growing corn for fuel instead of growing food crops if growing corn for fuel wasn't the most efficient use of resources -- balderdash I say - so inconceivable to be unbelievable.

Your claims are not unlike absurd claims that we should stop using paper tape for data storage and transport because fantastical concepts like "networks", "hard drives", and "flash memory" could be built and would work better. If it was true, we would be using "networks", "hard drives", and "flash memory" instead of paper tape for our data storage and transport needs. Oh... wait... never mind... now I'm very confused...