What Is a Nuclear Microreactor?

And while some property damage will result because it's all getting soaked, it's still better to have something left than nothing, and while an un-burnable building would be nice, it doesn't exist yet.

I'm not sure many people make this argument. Although the people that do are very vocal. But they are wrong. The general consensus around nuclear is that it adds to the number of solutions we can use. Considering the inhomogeneous nature of climate and regions nuclear may have advantages in certain areas, whereas other areas it may be unnecessary. Anyone claiming "one size fits all" is just selling snake oil. Essentially the argument comes down to "why time one hand behind your back when trying to solve an extremely important and challenging problem?"

As for waste, it isn't as big of a deal as you might think. Though this is more difficult to understand without an expertise in the subject matter. Mostly this is due to the complexity of understanding the different types of waste, amounts, and the vastly different levels of radiation in those waste products. Most of these conversations are akin to people talking about rocket science without knowing Newtonian mechanics. Just listen to the experts and see what they are saying. You're on HN, so I trust you can understand the nuance that scientists use, though I know that sometimes this can get confusing to the public. Like how "disagreement" isn't much of a disagreement but more quibbling over minor details.

Because you can generate power without adding CO2 to the air, or other pollutants. It works 24/7/365 and it requires no new "science" to produce.

However, the root of your question appears to me to be founded in some misconceptions you have about nuclear power. It isn't uncommon because the information in most popular press articles about nuclear power is over 50 years old.

To put that in perspective, imagine arguing the utility of an electric car when your data point is gas at 30 cents a gallon (the price in 1965[1])?

But to talk about nuclear power with current data about how you would design a power plant (and these are the new designs we're talking about), the risks of them leaking any radioactivity, and the risk to people should that radio activity leak and it makes our decision to keep building fossil fuel plants look pretty stupid. It really does turn the whole question on its head.

Nuclear is demonstrably cleaner, safer, lower risk, and potentially lower cost (although how do you price the cost of destroying the planet right?) than any other baseload technology. It even surpasses hydroelectric in terms of externalized costs of habitat destruction.

But I recognize that if you base your analysis on an idea that any new nuclear plant would be identical to the ones at Fukishima (built in 1967) or Chernoybl (built in 1972) it does seem odd that we would want more of that.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-888-august-31-2015...

> Why is nuclear the silver bullet that will save us?

Not supposed to be that, as others said.

> The waste will be around for longer than we are. We have no solution other than 'lock it up'.

If we sacrifice a Cubic mile to save the planet that's a god trade. Paul is a lot bigger than Peter here.

> Accidents do — and most like will — happen. How will increasing the volume of reactors not increase this risk?

The Tsunami was far worse than the meltdown; I am afraid people's fear-memory often conflates the two. I'm willing to admit the official stats with Chernobyl might be a coverup, but still, tons of poor people around the globe get sick or die from perhaps-illegal fossil fuel pollution. It's not a worse coverup than environment justice issues in the US.

The annoyance here among pro-nuclear people is that other thing's problems get to slip underneath the radar, but nuclear's don't.

> storage

Consider storage will require tons of lithium. The ecological damage from that mining will also be catastrophic, and the ecosystems might take as long to recover.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do lithium-ion batteries. We have little choice we're going to need more. Same thing with nuclear. Same thing with not decommissioning dams as soon as we like.

The fact is with all routes, avoiding ecological collapse will cause local environmental issues. What irks people is the singling out of nuclear, as if other things didn't have issues too, and other essential systems (like top soil) repair as slowly as some radioactive isotopes degrade.

Generally, it produces very little waste in terms of spent fuel[1] and much of that can be recycled. That does require building newer, modern reactors though.

> The waste will be around for longer than we are. We have no solution other than 'lock it up'.

This is another thing that people don't really understand. Radioactivity is viewed as a monolith in pop culture. There's a perception that a radioactive thing will kill you in thousands of years. In reality, the length of time that something is dangerous is inverse to how dangerous it is, ie, the longer it's radioactive, the less deadly it is (and vise versa). Plutonium-239, the long term radioactive byproduct (24,000 years) is not that deadly [2] compared to the much more radioactive cesium-137 and strontium-90 which both have a half life of around 30 years [3].

1. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239#Hazards 3. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/r...

For northern countries where wind is the primary renewable sources, there does not exist any clean storage that is currently deployed and getting investments. The current "storage" being combined with renewable are fossil fuels, primarily oil and gas. The subsidize for energy stability goes to fossil fuels, the investment for bigger reserve capacity goes to fossil fuels, the national energy plan here in Sweden as an example is fossil fuels for stability and renewable for cheap production.

Lithium batteries as an example are great when the charge cycle and capacity is measured in hours, like for solar. It works, it is cost effective, and it helps reduce the dependency on fossil fuels. For wind you have charge cycles measured in weeks and capacity demand that can last months.

There are a few experimental project (likely heavily subsidized, and none that I can find that operate on buying wind power and reselling it weeks later), but the flow of money goes very distinctly towards fossil fuels right now. Nuclear provide at least an working alternative, and the occasional accident is a much better future than the non-accidental climate change that is occurring right now.

That said, I would prefer if we simple banned fossil fuels as a strategy to provide gird stability and forced the market to decide on storage vs nuclear.

Only assuming technological advances are made that we can't count on. Current day we don't have storage solutions that will do it, and most micro stuff doesn't work well enough to meet current demand anyway....

Think of all the opportunities, the tourism...

I'm not sure existing nuclear is all that competitive with renewables+storage, but better designs absolutely could be. Better designs also wouldn't produce long-lived waste, and could also transmute existing long lived waste into short term. This will require R&D.

Increasing the number of wind turbines increases the risk of collisions with aircraft. What level of risk is acceptable to you? That's the question, not "will there be any increase in risk at all".

As a mitigation, combining them with battery storage would be an option, but then again it would still be cheaper to use wind or solar instead of nuclear as the source of energy.

Is that a typo? tons?

Also, you can make a bomb with uranium enriched to much less than weapons grade -- you'll just need a lot more of it compared to weapons grade uranium.

Indeed? I was of the understanding that the shutdown mechanisms were specifically for halting the chain reaction, and largely a solved problem with mature tech, and it was containing the decay heat of Gen 2 designs that was the trickier problem.

I am happy to be wrong about the latter, though perhaps not as happy to be wrong about the former.

Future is here, it just unevenly distributed.

The waste heat from a mini nuke is also perfect for district heating.

The proliferation risk seems like a valid concern, but that we have to store radioactive material for millennia isn't a valid criticism of nuclear in general because we already have to store nuclear material and the costs associated with storing more waste are marginal (if you can safely store a little nuclear waste then you can safely store a lot of it).

Using that logic, we should stop production of ammonia fertilizer.

> and you still have to dismantle it and store safely for millenia after use.

The fact is that the entire worlds nuclear waste can be contained in about one swimming pool, which can be placed in the middle of a mountain or some other geologically stable area. You can't say that about coal, or wind (junk turbines that can't be recycled), or solar. The death rate per terawatt-hour of generated nuclear is far less than any other fuel source.

The idea that Nuclear is a dead end has been made popular by pop culture from the 1970's and bad science driven by an agenda to keep everyone on a globalized fossil fuel monopoly run by the military industrial complex.

Deaths per terawatt-hours comparison chart: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

A failure at any single power plant is very unlikely to cause cascading failures in the rest of the grid because one power plant usually can't generate enough power relative to its grid.

Gross oversimplification but all of the power plants in a national grid are essentially coupled together [1] as a giant circuit made up of a ton of electromagnets - the generators converting coal/natgas powered steam or water/wind to electricity. These electromagnets are all operating at the same frequency in phase with each other which literally means that the generators spin in sync at ~60hz. These generators are often (usually?) heavy turbines with a lot of angular momentum so normally when you connect a power plant, it stays in phase just due to the sheer inertia of the rest of the grid because power follows phase [2].

When the phase changes suddenly - like when connecting a generator that is out of phase with the grid - all that inertia of the generator essentially slams into the electromagnetic force generated by the incoming current. If the rest of the grid (of hundreds/thousands of other generators) produces significantly more power, it'll just destroy the connecting one as if you brought a turbine powered jet engine to an instantaneous dead stop - the momentum of the blades will literally rip them off of the shaft. However, if the newly connected generators are producing a significant amount of power relative to the rest of the grid, like when a corona mass ejection hits or a large islanded subgrid is poorly reconnected, the resulting differential can generate a wave (again, gross simplification) that travels through the grid with enough power to destroy every single generator connected to it.

A single power plant just can't generate enough power to do damage to the rest of the grid [3] but if a natural disaster severed the connection between two regions of a grid and they drift out of phase, they must be carefully reconnected because they might have enough power to seriously damage other power plants.

[1] Some parts of a grid might be separated by HVDC which in effect isolates the parts

[2] Power flows from the faster generators to the slower ones, speeding them up until they hit equilibrium.

[3] There are exceptions depending on grid topology, but generally grids are designed to avoid them

With small modular reactors and similar, all the critical bits are made on a production line, and completely standardized. This will drastically reduced the paperwork and training needed to operate it safely.

Sounds like pretty much what I would have expected in terms of limitations, so we'd need something much more energy dense (Like fusion) and a more compact way to remove the heat and convert it to power.