this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
62 points (98.4% liked)

Canada

7218 readers
379 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Universities


πŸ’΅ Finance / Shopping


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] tunetardis@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I guess from a physics standpoint, one would expect an SMR to be somewhat less fuel efficient in that a nuclear reactor is essentially a furnace and the surface area to volume ratio favours a larger design to retain the heat. SMR proponents like to spin this as a "feature", however, in that they would be less likely to meltdown and that safety trumps efficiency in reactor design. Another point they claim from the safety standpoint is that if you had say a dozen SMRs replacing a single traditional reactor, you could routinely take one off-line for inspection/maintenance without a huge hit on power generation.

I don't know enough about this and most of what I read is anecdotal though, so take it with a grain of salt. There may still be a case for them in northern communities, many of which are off the grid and use large diesel/gas generators? I guess it would depend on how well SMRs can follow load, which has tended to be a problem with nuclear power.