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Excellent thread on SMRs

After Google and Kairos announced a deal to produce and consume nuclear power from future nuclear Small Modular Reactors, this discussion took place. Full of good info from Adrian Cockroft

(tags: smrs nuclear nuclear-power future sustainability david-gerard adrian-cockroft power)

Bert Hubert on Nuclear power in the EU

“Nuclear power: no, yes, maybe, but not like this”:

Currently many (European) countries are individually trying to order up new nuclear power, from many different places. But it appears we can’t treat nuclear reactors like (say) cars you can just procure. If we’d want to do this right, it is probably indeed better to not simply try to order stuff, but to engender a nuclear revival. To not simply point our fingers at Framatome and EDF and say “do better!”. What if we actually made this a European or transatlantic project, and add the vast expertise that is still hidden within our institutes, and indeed setup a project for building 50 nuclear reactors, or more? This would allow a broad base of research that would derisk the process, so we don’t necessarily find out after 15 years of construction that the design is too complicated. And perhaps also not try to pretend that we are leaving this to the free market, but recognize this as a public activity. Doing it like this would require governments, institutes and companies to think different, and I’m reasonably sure we can’t even get this done between a few like-minded countries. Most definitely the EU would not reach consensus on this, since Germany is fundamentally opposed to anything nuclear ever.

(tags: bert-hubert nuclear nukes nuclear-power eu future sustainability)