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Comment by sharcerer | Hacker News Reader

May I ask why you aren't a fan?

Another reason, as I have a moment to write... vulnerability to terrorist/military action. It's not enough to safeguard a plant against accidents. It needs to be safeguarded from malice as well - including inside jobs (a knowledgeable operator manipulating the controls, with full authorization) and brute violence, which could be crashing a fully fueled airliner into it or attacking with a bunker-busting military drone. What happens if your nuclear plant is hit with a weapon designed to destroy a modern military bunker complex? (Which could be a state actor, or an act of terrorism that somehow takes over a drone.)

Now, what happens when you blow up a windmill?

If someone blows up a reactor of this design, it will start shutting down. Meltdown shouldn't happen even if the core is badly hit, but additional cooling besides the pool may be needed. Safer than Fukushima which withstood a tsunami and operational failure with little environmental damage. (Though big economical.)

The more important risk is of theft of fissible material.

I think I mentioned in my OP that I appreciate the eye to modern safety here. But the proponents of nuclear as a (or THE) solution generally aren't talking about this design. They're either talking more of the same-old reactor designs that are decidedly not safe for these sorts of attacks, or near-vaporware like thorium that no one actually builds in the real world.

I think safety from anything short of a nuclear attack, including insider sabotage, is essential. And the only way to do that is to build a reactor that can't fail even if its containment is destroyed. I haven't seen that design yet.

edit: I'm actually less worried about the theft of fissionable material, as commercial reactor-grade materials aren't anywhere near bomb-grade, and would need a lot of refinement (a dedicated facility) to make bombs. It's mostly a problem for state-level actors like Iran that will shuffle fissionable material from their civilian reactor projects over into secret military projects. fwiw, the reason Iran even has substantial uranium is because, in the 1970s, the US was merrily building a half-dozen civilian reactors for our good friend the Shah of Iran. So when the revolution happened in 1979, those all fell into the hands of our new most hated enemies. And 40 years later, they still have all that uranium and leftover know-how and equipment to play with. Which gets back to my whole "Do we build reactors in Yemen?" question.

My concern with this is that small reactors have been tried in the past, and were too expensive to operate. The staff needed to run a reactor does not scale linearly with power output. This is why utility reactors got large. Even so, when natural gas is cheap and renewables are available those large reactors are having some trouble competing just on operating cost. Working reactors in the US are being shut down because of this.

A number of reasons, but for starters, consider inequality. Are we going to give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia afford one?

They are expensive, require tremendous infrastructure, and mean deploying fissionable materials to countries that maybe shouldn't have them. So it's solving a First World problem, and exacerbating the divide between rich and poor.

> Are we going to give Yemen a nuclear power plant? Somalia? Can Bolivia afford one?

This is an excellent case for these lighter reactors, but perhaps more so for molten salt / Thorium reactors.

Where this reactor has smaller amounts of radioactive material and Thorium has little use in weapons.

I have a market argument against thorium reactors - basically, if they were as awesome as their proponents argue, then someone would have built one by now, for commercial purposes. But there hasn't ever been a commercial thorium reactor, and there hasn't been a serious build since the 1960s. Fifty years, and a lot of countries that aren't full of namby-pamby treehuggers to blame for it. Even India, which is sitting on like a third of the world's thorium reserves, doesn't build them.

This makes me rather suspect that thorium isn't nearly as awesome as its proponents think it is.

Wouldn't that reason cover basically every infrastructure, economic and legal improvement you could possibly think of in all areas, as long as they are reasonably hard to do for a troubled country?

Even a basic thing like a Rule of Law that we take for granted hugely increases inequality between countries that have it and those that don't.

Solution to that does not involve encouraging warlords to move into Manhattan.

If a country can't afford / can't be trusted with energy generation technology, and you care, help fix the underlaying reasons.

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