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Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
(blog.ucsusa.org)
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
While clearly biased and theres some wording and cherrypicking of studies (that isn't very egregious, to be clear!) that I'd take issue with in a more formal setting, the content of the article thru to point two are really quite an alright summary of the issues and raises some very valid questions the industry has yet to answer.
However it throws itself off the credibility cliff riiiiiight around this point:
What in the fearmongering fuck is this? "Oh no, terrorists!" And it's debunked on the first page of one of its own sources. Regulators have NOT put any pathways in place to "exempt SMRs from many of the protective measures." If you read the sources, what they have done is put in place guidelines for the evaluation of the current measures, to judge if those measures merit being re-evaluated. Its a path for a path to judge if maybe we should have a path.
And fucking hell, yes of course they would have smaller security contingents, the installations are physically smaller! There's less to guard! Thats in no small part the point!
Look there are a lot of problems with SMRs and even more questions we just don't have answers for yet. Those questions need answers before any progress can be made with SMRs. The benefits of lower transmission losses, dedicated power generation for industrial complexes being at all beneficial, or remotely finalized designs for the reactor technology needed here are all MASSIVE outstanding issues that have yet to be solved.
But this shit? "we cant have this source of green energy because terrorists!!!"
Fuck off with that.
There are more than enough issues with SMRs to justify extreme skepticism, hell microsoft wanting a bunch is probably reason enough to abandon the whole concept. We dont need to stoop to disinformation and blatant lies, what the fuck. This is why "nuclear bros" (Which great idea, lets "other" the critics, that's not a red flag at all...) get so much traction, because they dont stoop to conspiracy theory tropes to support their arguments.
There are plenty of good arguments against SMRs: none of them include terrorism.
The theory was always that you could get economies of scale if you were building the same reactor every time in a factory and transporting it to install somewhere else. In practice those economies never materialized (did they even exist?)
Meanwhile solar, wind, and batteries have plummeted in cost. There is no need for base load power generation if we have sufficient battery storage and an oversupply of generators - which is entirely feasible for wind and solar.
I'm sorry, I think you may not be using 'baseload' correctly. We will absolutely always have to meet the requirements for baseload power generation, otherwise we aren't making enough power and we will have brownouts.
If what you meant was that a grid relying on solar and wind for primary generation and supplemented with battery facilities can make up the deficit at night/on calm days, then while that would be ideal it is extremely unlikely to happen in the next several decades. Battery technology is not anywhere near ready for this solution, and while ESS are making extremely impressive advances, they are such a new technology that it would be intellectually dishonest for me to list their shortcomings here. They are simply too new to know which problems are inherent to the concept, and which are due simply to flawed engineering of a new technology.
For matters of logistics, a few large generating sources linked together are much more desirable than a distributed network. In fact the issue with economies of scale in power generation is one of the arguments against SMRs made by the above linked article's author. One of the biggest concerns with truly distributed power generation is safety - namely, how can you safely work on a downed line when every single house has the independent capacity to energize the lines? But those large power generating stations run into the same issue that SMRs are in vogue to solve; what do we do about crypto miners ~~besides grinding them all up into dog food, which gets my vote.~~ Their drain, and those of industry and data centers and so on, on local power infrastructure remains despite the source of the power in the system.
No need for power generation dedicated to the base load.
Nuclear power generation is base load only: it does not full the role of a peaker.
Battery + renewable technology is already the primary source of power on many grids and the trend continues accelerating in that direction.
I'm really sorry to do this again, but did you mean tribes?
Grids*
Ducking autocorrect