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Setback For Small Nuclear Reactors: B&W Cuts mPower Funding
mdsolar (1045926) writes with news that funding for the mPower, a Small Modular [Nuclear] Reactor, has been cut due to the inability to find investors interested in building a prototype. From the article: "The pullback represents a major blow to the development of SMRs, which have been hailed as the next step forward for the nuclear power industry. ... All told, B&W, the DOE, and partners have spent around $400 million on the mPower program. Another $600 million was needed just to get the technology ready for application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing. ... B&W plans to continue low-level R&D on the mPower technology with a view to commercial deployment in the mid-2020s, said CEO James Ferland. But without a major shift in the business environment and in investor perceptions of the risks and rewards associated with nuclear power, that seems fanciful."
That rant was all emotion-fuelled fallacies.
1) No-one was suggesting making "suitcase nukes" and sending them around, because nuclear bombs and reactors necessarily work differently. That's why the worst case scenario in a nuclear power plant is a meltdown, not a nuclear explosion.
2) Fukishima was not a nuclear disaster, it was a huge tsunami damaging a nuclear facility, complicating the existing natural disaster due to risks of radiation exposure. The technology being researched was not featured. There were also no terrorists (or unicorns or fairies) involved.
3) Nuclear fusion is promising and exciting but has net negative power production at the moment, as opposed to fission which has had massive net positive power production for a long time.
4) People researching small nuclear reactions want to merge Yahoo and Myspace to make megawatt xrays for bird watching? You'll have to ask your unicorns and fairies about this one because it doesn't sound like anything on this planet.
5) Spouting insults at people doesn't make them wrong nor you right.
There are real risks to using nuclear power, but if you are to ever understand them you need to calm down and accept their actual nature, scale and likelihood instead of conflating everything with the word "nuclear" in it with the explosion of nuclear weapons. As an advanced course you can compare individual approaches fairly to their practical alternatives (which all have their own issues) before making a judgement.
Given the work China and India are doing on molten-salt Thorium cycle reactors, I can't see why anyone would spend another dime on a pressurized water reactor again.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."