> doesn't need an expensive fence with 24/7 guards
You means, like most industrial plants anyway or even college campuses?
An “expensive fence” and 24/7 security guard are still ridiculously cheap compared to the price of the thing itself.
You means, like most industrial plants anyway or even college campuses?
An “expensive fence” and 24/7 security guard are still ridiculously cheap compared to the price of the thing itself.
> Small modular reactors (SMRs), proposed as the future of nuclear energy, have purported cost and safety advantages over existing gigawatt-scale light water reactors (LWRs). However, few studies have assessed the implications of SMRs for the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle. The low-, intermediate-, and high-level waste stream characterization presented here reveals that SMRs will produce more voluminous and chemically/physically reactive waste than LWRs, which will impact options for the management and disposal of this waste. Although the analysis focuses on only three of dozens of proposed SMR designs, the intrinsically higher neutron leakage associated with SMRs suggests that most designs are inferior to LWRs with respect to the generation, management, and final disposal of key radionuclides in nuclear waste.
Or build an underground parking lot, park the SMR in it, put a serious door in front, and use the space above it for something else.
Conventional construction underground, especially of something complex, is expensive. But much of the point of an SMR is that it’s built off site and then installed. Driving a container down a ramp or lowering one off a crane is straightforward.
Nuclear power stations are an extreme, not typical, example
[1] unless you leave the nuclear reactor unattended in the hands of terrorists for days, they won't be able to extract any nuclear material (which would be the worse case scenario and only one comparable to terrorist stealing a vial of Ebola or Smallpox)