Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactor. Energy Revolution or delusional distraction? 

to sum up: we have the safest, most reliable and least resource (and land) intensive energy source on the line and the main argument against it is "we shloud've invested in it sooner"

Let's not forget that there are designers touting the possibility of using alot of the currently stored waste as fuel for their MSR designs. Reducing the waste inventory volume by over 90% and reducing the half-life cycles to less than 500 years. Whatever happens in the electrical power generation industry, people need to realize that what adds the most time is regulatory delays. There are very few sites that are willing to allow the new, UNTESTED, reactors in their backyards. I for one like what is happening with the advances in Malaysia.

Kirk Sorenson has done a great video about what makes up nuclear waste . The really interesting thing about it is that all of the individual compounds are actually very valuable, but they're just not much use all mixed up together. One of the huge benefits of molten salt systems, be they fast or thermal, thorium or uranium, is that they can also support the separation of that nuclear 'waste' into it's high value components.

This was a great RU-vid. I liked your RU-vid on molten salt nuclear reactors even better. Yes, advanced nuclear does have its downsides but so do renewables. Renewables take up huge amounts of real estate and they have to be replaced every 20 years. The U.S. will need about 18 billion square meters of solar panels and 500,000 5 MW wind turbines that are the height of a 50 story skyscraper. After 20 years, the U.S. will then have to replace 80 5 MW wind turbines each day and 1.23 million square meters of solar panels each day forever. All that material will need to be recycled or we will run out of atoms to make them. We will also have to build huge amounts of batteries and recycle them as well. The chemical energy in batteries and fossil fuels can only store about 2 eV of energy per atom. So just think of any battery as an equally-sized container of gasoline for energy content purposes. On the other hand, Uranium and Thorium atoms contain 200 million eV per atom or about 100 million times as much energy. That energy came from two neutron stars colliding to form a black hole maybe 6 billion years ago. Again, from 1975 - 1979, I was an exploration geophysicist exploring for oil, first with Shell and then with Amoco. But in 1979, I made a career change and transitioned into IT partly out of concern for climate change. Things are much worse than people are willing to admit. We are now at 410 ppm of carbon dioxide and it looks like we have already ignited the positive feedback loops in the Arctic and Antarctic that will initiate a greenhouse gas mass extinction like the End-Permian greenhouse gas mass extinction 251 million years ago. The Sun is a main-sequence star and is getting 1% brighter every 100 million years, so the Sun is 2.5% brighter than it was at the end of the Permian. The Industrial Revolution just lit the fuse. It brought us up from 280 ppm to 410 ppm in just a few hundred years. But there are huge amounts of carbon up in the Arctic that the planet has been stockpiling for the past 2.5 million years in permafrost and methane clathrate during the Pleistocene Ice Ages. All of that carbon dioxide and methane are now beginning to enter the atmosphere as the Arctic defrosts. It seems that our Industrial Revolution burning fuse has already gotten to the dynamite stick. Things happen so slowly in geological time that people just don't see it happening. It will not take a lot of energy to block the Sun with sulfate aerosols, but the real problem with greenhouse gas mass extinctions has always been ocean acidification. The carbon dioxide coming from the melting Arctic will lower the pH of the ocean to the point where marine life cannot make carbonate structures. The oceans will die shortly after that. We are going to need huge amounts of energy to geoengineer the planet back to a level of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide with 40,000 1-megaton/year Direct Air Capture plants running on advanced nuclear energy. The only solution I can see is to use molten salt nuclear reactors to burn the 250,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 1.2 million tons of depleted uranium, and the huge mounds of thorium waste from rare earth mines that we already have on hand. I have been watching Plan A in action since 1979 and it does not seem to be working. We need a nuclear Plan B. I am now 70 years old, and my guess is that my grandchildren will be forced to use Plan B in about 50 years. Regards, Steve Johnston

As always, thankyou for your highly researched, civilised contents

In a previous job, 20 years ago or so, I saw Rolls Royce's proposal for the SIR reactor (Safe Integral Reactor) in partnership with the Americans. It had an oversized pressure vessel that contained all of the primary coolant (radioactive water) and heat exchangers on the inside. That means that if there was a primary coolant leak, it would be contained within the pressure vessel. No SIR reactor was ever built.

Here in Argentina we are in the assembly stage of one of these reactors. A small 25 Mw experimental design. Designed by our AEC and INVAP. If things turn out ok, the next step will be scaling up. The same idea, modular design, no runaway reactions, etc. Your video raises some important points which are not debated around here. Thanks.

In the middle of WWII, each side did a lot of weapons research to come up with solutions for battleground challenges. A lot of these projects were ultimately useless, but there was simply no time to have a committee analyse all the projects and choose the best. This 'inefficiency' was OK because the war was about the survival of 'our way of life'. It's about time we all recognise that climate change is a truly existential threat to our way of life and start treating it with the same sense of urgency as WWII. So, by all means invest in both SMR and renewables. Losing £210 million on an SMR project that may ultimately fail is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But a the same time: keep rolling out renewables + storage and keep decommissioning fossil power plants. We can finance it all with climate bonds.

As usual the biggest single issue with SMRs is *NOT BEING MENTIONED -> The fuel grade* For Uranium to work in a standard fission (edit for typo) reactor the percentage of U235 has to be increased from the natural 80% U235). This came up during the recent AUKUS agreement discussions when it was pointed out the new reactors powering these types of subs used *weapons grade* uranium fuel to get the 25 year lifetime. And yes as an engineer I know the numbers and definitions vary depending on who's talking. However the point is SMRs are being promoted as needing only to be refueled or being able to generate power for 25 years. *So what sort of fuel grade do you think that requires?*

I'm in the don't keep all your eggs in the same basket camp. I quite like SMR's and while I'm very supportive of renewables they do have their limitations.

First time viewer, now a subscriber. Well done sir. Nice to see a reasoned, rational, fair minded take on any controversial subject these days. This type of treatment of any issue is worth supporting.

Some people are concerned about how long the waste from Gen 1-3 reactors remains dangerous - but they never mention how long regular industrial waste, like that created from the manufacture of solar cells, remains dangerous. As far as I know, many industrial wastes remain dangerous in perpetuity. Do eg lead or mercury oxides ever become harmless? I don't think so. I worked with some environmental engineers on a superfund site with tens of thousands of tons of PAH's. A scary site that gave me skin burns from working in the area - but out of site from the general public. IMHO the problem of industrial wastes dwarf the problem of spent fuel, which can be burned as fuel in the most modern reactor designs.

You are a great teacher, at the very least you are to me everytime I watch one of your videos. Thankyou for investing your time that provides me with greater understandings. If I ever have a livable income I promise to join your patreon, until then I am thankful for the free educations. You rock Dude!

The argument against SMRs not being ready before 2030 does not hold water. The mitigation for renewables intermittency drawback is storage but all of them suffer the same problem, either by not being ready or because they need an immense fabrication scale if they are to be realized. Both are necessary, because having base-load reduces the amount of storage you need, and then also reduces over-capacity you require to build to cover for the eventual weeks of no sun or no wind.

Something that was not really discussed here in the comparison of nuclear to renewables is the efficient use of land. Over any given time span SMR plants will produce manyfold more electricity than solar or wind farms of the same size and not require the same supporting battery storage infrastructure. I think that must be an important point of consideration especially for small population dense countries like the UK.

Nice video on this topic is "Pandora's Promise". Worth checking out. Also a UK startup Moltex Energy, has taken an old 1950's idea and turned it into a workable molten salt reactor (not Thorium). It can be adapted to run in the fast neutron spectrum, and therefore burn up transuranic waste from existing PWRs and AGRs .

For the last few days, here in the U.K, we have had virtually no wind and heavily overcast skies, a not especially unusual situation for this time of the year in this country. During this period wind and solar have struggled to produce barely 6% of the grids total generation requirement. SMRs will be a vital back up for such occasions if the lights are to be kept on when gas is turned off. Oh and by the way, who knows how the grid will cope then when it has to take on the job of heating millions of our homes with electric powered heat pumps.

In 1995, if we had all been informed grown-ups about the reality of climate change and started developing the nuclear power generation technology that was within reach then, we wouldn't be walking on a knife edge of global catastrophe now. It'll be great if safer and cheaper renewables can take over more of our power generation now, but the misinformation and disbelief in climate change lost us 25 years of transition time.

Excellent video. Some really good points that don't get talked about enough. I especially appreciate the link to the Barnard article.

Thank you. Excellent content fairly and calmly presented. This is a fantastic resource.

I seem to recall one of the SMR projects advertising 20y run-time reactors that are not refueled during that time, but instead replaced entirely after 20 years, with refueling/scrapping of old units done back in a central facility. Not to mention how great it would be to have nuclear reactors with modern design, instead of reusing the 1970's designs...Also, I wonder if anyone looked into the eco footprint of an SMR vs the same generation capacity in solar/etc + required storage?

currently in Australia, the media landscape has lost all nuance when it comes to SMRs, they are either the only option, or literally as bad as a 24/7 Chernobyl. thankyou for showing that a reasonable middleground of "yeah, solar works, and we should swap coal for it as soon as possible, but a little bit of reliable base load is worth it.

Christmas is comming up ... so I wish you all the best! Thank you for all your work and effort! All the best m

Thanks for another informative wrap up.

Anyone that has watched UK power generation stats over any period of time can see that renewables have the most enormous downside - intermittency. Until there are ENORMOUS energy storage solutions available wind and solar cannot be relied upon for "base-load". The only renewable that can is biomass, and that is frowned upon by people that do not understand that energy production is all about energy storage - either before you turn it in to electricity or afterwards.... EDIT Biomass can be relied upon for base-load in a very few locations - there is not enough (ethical / green) biomass production for it to be rolled out en mass for base-load production globally.

Nuclear powered ships are an interesting thing to think about and how that might scale up to fixed facilities

Excellent, thought-provoking video!

Very interesting as always!

What is needed is to develop a system that can make use of or recycle nuclear waste. To consentrate it, refine it, re-use it... something. Storing it for 100,000 years isn't a sustainable solution to our energy requirements, current or future.

9:01 The next non-highlighted sentence gives much needed context. If you count the low level waste (which is orders of magnitude less radioactive than high-level) you obviously get a big scary number, which I suspect was the goal of the high-light. Hypothetically, removing the cladding and melting all spent nuclear fuel the US has accumulated though 60 years of commercial nuclear power (providing 25% of it's electrical demand) would give a 18m x 18m x 18m cube. Not that scary now, right? By the way, it would be interesting to calculate the amount of industrial waste after equivalent TWh output of solar and wind, counting manufacture and disposal after decomission, just for comparison... 12:32 Well, I can think of one obvious reason; since the whole point of going small is to make everything easier, cheaper and faster to install, imagine what happens when is time to decomission a reactor that was transported by a truck. The same truck comes and take it to reprocess. I personally feel lukewarm about that waves of SMRs, because they will begin to be built in the next decade, while we needed them to start producing baseload electricity two decades ago.... better late than never I suppose

Excellent overview, thank you.

This was one of the better discussions of SMR's that I've seen.

This video struck me as mostly anti-nuclear, relegating it to a small fraction. In reality, nuclear has so much to offer, SMRs are a small (though exciting) part of it. Waste becomes far less of a concern if reprocessed and used in newer "breeder" reactors, as most of the "waste" of nuclear today (including SMRs) is unconsumed uranium 238 (which doesn't fission to produce energy until "bred"). Proliferation is a far lower concern and poor argument against nuclear. If a country wants nuclear weapons, they will build its own reactors to do it. If you want electric power, the "waste" is far too contaminated to build a bomb (mixed with Pu 240, etc isotopes, it can't explode in a nuclear reaction). As for the cost, I expect as building and acceptance of nuclear increases, it will get cheaper, just as has happened with other "renewables". However, those sources require backup, since the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. That is a LOT of stored energy and added cost that is NOT factored into them today. Finally, new nuclear (Gen IV) reactors can run far hotter, which increases thermal efficiency and the overall higher temperature is directly useful for chemical reactions, such as producing ammonia for fertilizer (or fuel) or for creating carbon-neutral fuels, or perhaps for using the left-over energy for desalination or decarbonization. The possibilities are endless, we just have to get started again.

I wasn't to keen on the "storage on site" bit for the waste in the RR information. Some of the more interesting implementations of molten salt SMRs have the reactor module being able to be swapped out and replaced with a "clean" unit. The old one would be brought back to the base plant for the more complicated job of re-refining the fuel and removing the unusable isotopes for disposal.

Good one, well put together.

Thanks a bunch I've been looking for more information on SMR's. First time watching one of your videos enjoyed your analysis.

My hope is that SMRs can be made to run on existing waste to use it up. There are some proposed Gen IV designs that might do so. If they can get rid of some current waste in a few hundred years instead of us having to store it for longer than recorded human history that would be good, I think. I wonder if the Rolls Royce design might be capable of doing this.

For safety it might be worth researching how nuclear submarines safely record is and how spent fuel is dealt with. I’m certainly with the middle ground and need a range of base load options like smaller modular nuclear and barrage tidewater and other options. We all know Uk weather is random and we can’t completely rely on solar and wind, even if limitless battery storage. Also fusion is always 20 years away.

Excellent FOOD FOR THOUGHT...THANKS!

I really appreciate how you present pro and con arguments for all of the technologies you cover here. So glad RU-vid suggested this channel. Keep it up.

I am not opposed to nuclear power but from a cost and safety point of view 21st century geothermal is the way to go. Eavor Technologies has a system which can go almost anywhere, provide the same base load, with none of the safety issues.

Oooh good title, gut reaction is were gonna end up with a load of these, let's see

You are in my opinion by far the best commentator on the climate and energy crisis. Clear concise comprehensive and balanced. Just have a think, sound North of England advice!

Great video as always

I tend to welcome the Rolls Royce proposal. There is too much clean energy in nuclear power to ignore. The problem with nuclear is that the 60 year old technology used at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima is too dangerous. Surely with some new design approaches the risk of nuclear energy could be significantly reduced. We have seen obvious evidence that humans in the loop to oversee the operation of reactors doesn't really work.

I think we need to use 4 th gen nuclear to reduce our 1 & 2 gen waste. But the industry magnates should be made to pay for it.

good luck Dave best of all the years to come geezer!

Impresively clear and well presented as always. Thank you.

This looks very promising. We still need to focus on energy efficiency and using less resources in the first place.

This was a positive, well presented anti nuclear video. Moltex molten salt SMR-W which uses 'waste' as fuel, which simply cannot under any circumstances have a melt down. I think your costs were off. SMR's are likely to generate at 3-7 p per KWh to the grid. In the UK we've not have much wind or solar for about 4 days now. For just 4 days we'll need more than 1,920 GWh of storage. Please can anyone suggest an energy storage solution to provide that and at what cost and what round trip efficiency? Currently fossil fuels are making up for the lack of wind and solar.

Also, thanks for the shout out for UHVDC electricity "it's always sunny somewhere"

Wow this was well done! Not biased just pure helpful information without being obtrusive, I wish I could impart my green position as kindly as you! Subbed to learn more!

The Rolls Royce SMR will have problems competing on the cost of power. The ThorCon reactor complex in Indonesia is aiming for a cost of 3 cents per kW/h. If you are not in that cost area, you can't compete. This means that molten salt reactors will be built faster than coal plants due to needing less materials. The Chinese say that their first molten salt reactor will take 2 years to build. The next will take 1 year.

Did I miss it but are the RR reactors uranium or thorium? My understanding is that thorium reactors not only consume most of their fuel they can also ‘burn’ spent uranium waste thereby mitigating storage issues.

Cracking video as ever, well balanced. Thanks

Thanks 🙏 great video

I am certain we can halt the use of CO2 using almost all renewables, but I am not certain that we can't get rid of the elevated levels of CO2 without nuclear fission/fusion/orbital solar. Of those 3 fission is the most immediately available.

I suspect this is too little, too late.

Very well balanced discussion. Thankyou

Great presentation.

Nice contribution. What I missed a bit was how the residual of coal and oil plants are disposed of. Especially the cinder is mostly still used for landfill, while it contains loads of heavy metals and other toxic substances, and is also radioactive. Applying the same rules, it would have to be disposed of the same way as other weakly radioactive waste, and that would exceed the radioactive waste by several magnitudes. So, it's also a political issue, not only a technical.

I often think that a single mismanaged nuclear plant isn't restrained to being someone else's problem, but is rather a potential threat to the entire biosphere. Now couple that with the fact that maintenance and waste management require a high level of technological commitment that will span millenia. It's a lot to ask/demand of our descendants.

awesome as always

another excellent, well researched presentation, thanks!

Th only thing I point you towards is Devonport. Go there and see how many old rusting nuclear subs you can count. All have their reactors still on board. No one knows what to do with them. I’m all in favour of nuclear, but let’s sort out our past before ruining more of the future.

It's a big problem, IMHO, that these discussions leave out a couple of issues such as grid stability and scaling of alternative technologies. Just because wind and solar is cheaper doesn't mean there's no point in building stable, larger generators in the grid. And if you look at the numbers of wind and solar installations needed it's pretty clear that it can't be the only solution, it won't meet the demand by 2030 either, no matter how much money you throw at it, the scalability isn't there (and we don't have the luxury of extra time to wait for the next breakthrough). Just accept the fact that we have already failed to make the goal set out for 1.5 degrees. We need to look further ahead to 2050 or 2060 where we also need more energy, not only replace existing output. I say we build as many reactors as possible and if we survive the next 200 years as a species we can take care of the nuclear waste then, otherwise we're already dead and a little radiation won't be a problem 😊😊👍❤️🍀 #thinkpositive

Great video, thanks very much. All the best,. M

Great stuff!

Thorium Molten-Salt Reactors, Small Modular Reactors, Stirling Engines, Flywheel Storage and improvements to Atomic Battery technologies would all go a long way to improving the robustness of our energy grid. (The Atomic Battery technologies could theoretically be seamlessly merged with the reactors themselves so that they can still produce a tiny bit of power from spontaneous decay when they aren't fully online / critical.) Solid-state battery supercapacitor hybrids would also be handy for energy storage... Nuclear power plants could be constructed to double as Geothermal plants via closed cycle heat transfer... And if we still aren't able to fulfill all of that remaining 20% demand, then we can try working to reduce our global energy consumption. Preferably by increasing the efficiency of our infrastructure and industrial sectors.

Have any nuclear systems (commercial or military) ever met their target costs; and how much has it costs us to decommission these facilities? The point that it may be far wiser to invest in renewables, is a good one. We do have to develop grid scale storage solutions, though. Hopefully, liquid metal and gravity storage systems, for instance, can be scaled up quickly. The cost to decommission such systems will be far lower than nuclear and there will never be a contamination problem with them.

As a nuclear engineer with more than 40 years experience in the UK electricity supply industry, I found this a very fair and comprehensive summary of the subject. I started my professional career working in the UK nationalized electricity supply business, and we took the view that a mix of power generation was necessary to provide resilience to the system. I'm still of that view, hence I strongly believe that we should aim for a baseload of nuclear, perhaps 20-30%, with the balance coming from renewables. Points raised in the video re security surrounding nuclear materials and waste are very valid, hence I doubt very much if SMRs would be deployed anywhere other than existing nuclear sites, where security and a skilled workforce already exist. Talk of SMRs springing up all over the country, including from our own prime minister, are just nonsense, and do great harm to our industry.

Thank you!

Slight nit-pick: whilst we can add up the number of deaths for coal and brown coal, we can't directly add their death *rates* (to get "over 50"). The combined rate will be somewhere between 24.62 (if there's more coal) and 32.72 (if there's more brown coal); the precise figure depends on the proportion of power generated by each, but it can never reach 50 (or indeed 33!)

The NIMBY problem does not diminish with the smallness of the reactor. So whatever the build time, add ten years. As an elderly human I wish all you younger humans good luck fixing climate change.

Just mentioning that renewables can cover 100% of energy demand is totally ridiculous. Especially with no regard to the huge CO2 impact of manufacturing of solar panels and windmills, and the huge problem of their disposal after a relatively short service life. All in all, a flawed comparison.

I agree with you completely. I'll share this content as a suggestion to better understand the subject. It takes seriously into account many aspects of the overall topic, as in public opinion is perceived. Gently bringing to attention your balanced opinion, it was enlightening, Just as a Think.

We've yet to deal with nuclear waste on geologic timescales, especially in the U.S.. Nuclear proliferation remains a serious problem. Better we invest those billions in storage technologies and correctly provisioning (oversizing) photovoltaic and wind generation.

I'm liking the idea of consistent nuclear baseload for H2 generation and storage facilities. Or indeed, the opposite, nuclear for grid baseload, freeing up renewable intermittent assets for h2 generation at 100% capacity factor...if that is possible.

Great video - thoughtful, neutral and looking for realistic positives

Part 2 Cont'd There is one huge issue regarding thermal power plants: they use a huge amount of water. I've read that about 40% of total water draw is used by thermal power plants. This obviously is not environmentally friendly.

A more balanced presentation of the newest shiny bauble. Too often the presenter is giddy.

I believe small scale nuclear will be the necessary step needed to get us to the next tech that hopefully will liberate our future power needs. If done properly it’s quite safe and efficient.

"Just Have A Think" Excellent Work- cast & crew - +380K subscribers

Tha ks for this video. A key consideration is also the materials intensity per unit of energy delivered. And for that, nuclear really has an edge over renewables (which I strongly support), for construction, fuel and dismantling. Maybe a topic for a future video?

I think these will be a useful addition to the UK energy mix. Today is a calm winters day and the National Grid website is showing very little renewable generation. Unless some new storage technology comes along then betting the farm on renewables is a joke. We are going to need a lot more electricity soon with electric cars and heat pumps becoming more and more popular.

Nuclear waste disposal is a "joke," how come France (and Japan used to) recycles nuclear waste, the US built a nuclear disposal plant in Morris IL, which then President Jimmy Carter shut down. Why not reuse nuclear waste? As always a terrific informative video clip.

Thank you.

Another excellent presentation, thanks.👌👌👏👏👏🇦🇺

Costs for base load buffering and correction should be factored into the MWh cost of renewables. In exactly the same manner, perpetuated storage of radioactive waste should be factored into the MWh cost of nuclear. That will allow for fair comparisons. I don’t see it being favorable for nuclear power though, 10000 years is a rather long write-off horizon.

I do think that most places will need some form of nuclear to decarbonise the last 20% of their grids. This includes energy imports, not only domestic production. It does make sense to give some support to scalable methods of manufacturing nuclear power, and if they can produce and install SMRs in less than 5 years that could have a significant impact over the snail's pace of large nuclear. On the other hand, the world's renewable resources are truly enormous, and renewables have until 2030 to develop additional technologies to out-compete nuclear. That is quite a long time, and I think it is likely that that last 20% will shrink down to 5 or even 1% that renewables cannot handle easily. If they sort their generation and investment out, countries like Morocco can become exporters of enormous quantities of energy and firm the grids of many nations while becoming very wealthy in the process. I think this is likely to become more important than nuclear power for most applications.

Nice work

Thank you, Mr. Borlace, for your informed commentaries and questions. For me, your approaches to appraising both our personal and social choices in re climate and sustainable energy needs provide us with useful, collective choice-making resources. I don't know if, in other presentations of yours here, you've discussed the growing suspicion of technological innovation; you have pointed to widespread suspicion about nuclear power generation from the standpoints of operational safety and very long term environmental and public safety hazards. The real world 'fates' of applied technologies have always included unintended or not publicized risks and consequences; many people now ask what information is being withheld, how useful for the future is the in-hand information being used to do the evaluations of costs, benefits, and interests involved over the real world lifetime of any technology once applied, once up and running? Can we apply lessons in this category experience in order to do diligent assessments, so that even the most productive and successful of technological corrections and innovations do, in fact, proceed from much improved 'fates' estimates that community members understand and trust? Once again, I am grateful for your work presented on this channel.

Encore a great, informative, balanced video ! 👍 Yet, about renewable energy, I have read recently that the UK 2021 production of those has been very low because of adverse weather. Is it safe to count at 100% on them ?

Thank you for making this extremely balanced and informative video! I'm always impressed by how thoroughly you research and how clearly you present these topics, but this video is even more impressive than usual. I think you've changed my mind on small modular reactors. Previously I really loved the idea of this technology, particularly as a supplement to renewable electricity sources in northern countries where we get less total sun. Small nuclear reactors also seem like a vital technology for any future space colonies, so why not develop them as soon as possible? But you make a really good point about the urgency of the situation. We need alternative energy _right now_ , not decades from now. We need to start decommissioning coal and natural gas plants immediately (or at the very least when they reach the end of their operational lifetimes) and replace them with non C02 emitting alternatives. There's no time to wait for nuclear technology to be developed. I still like nuclear technology and I think there's a case for public and private money being spent developing it, but it should be seen as a medium-future technology, not as a solution to the current climate crisis.

Don;t forget also that the LCO of wind does not account for storage or any measures to make it useful when we need it, so its not comparing like-for-like. Nuclear works 24/7, wind and solar.. not so much. Once you add in the storage costs to make comparable, the numbers are significantly higher for renewables.

A good explanation

Hrm looking at how they ascertained those saftey stats is interesting, it appears the number of people who were impacted over long-term radiation exposure is very very difficult to discern and remains highly contested. Part of this difficulty lies in the methodology used to estimate long-term deaths. Even using the ‘linear no-threshold model’ (LNT) typically applied in assessments of radiation risk and environmental protection their seems to be contention. E.g. Chernobyl direct deaths could be seen as 31 direct deaths, but due to long term exposure deaths predictions range from 4,000(who) - 60,000 (Fairlie and Sumner).

The problems that are discussed (other than scaling) are dealt with by using Thorium reactors (LFTR) that are both passively safe AND can consume existing waste stocks (at least reducing them down to the centuries of storage vs the current multiple millennia storage requirements). As for the "scaling" issue, that is just false. Scaling happens differently for different products. Take homes, for example. If you are just building a "one off" house, there is no scaling. If you are a developer with a limited set of floor plans, then you can make them cheaper because your people become more familiar with how to build the houses and can make them more cheaply. Your scale is in the tens of houses. If you are a builder of modular (e.g. pre-fab) houses, then your people are not only able to be more specialized/knowledgeable, but you can create an assembly line and even automate some of the processes. Your scale can be in the hundreds. This applies to other large projects. Airplanes are a good example. The "Spruce Goose" was very expensive, but additional copies would have been much less expensive. This is shown with current planes that are being built. Additionally, the security issues can more easily be resolved by placing these smaller units underground where they will be resistant to attacks and security can more easily be enforced. Also, if there were, somehow, a catastrophic problem, the "problem" is already buried and can be dealt with in a more leisurely manner (vs, say, the Fukushima meltdown). Regardless, my biggest issue is the technology. Using a technology that has waste that lasts for thousands of years AND was popularized because it can provide nuclear weapons grade plutonium is, IMO, not the best technology for POWER GENERATION. "Efficiency" is also a non-issue. A nuclear power plant is a system to produce electricity. The system is already set to deliver electricity at costs as low as 1/2 that of traditional nuclear plants, so regardless of how "inefficient" plumbing or whatever might be, it is very "cost efficient", less than most other base load plants, which is the measure that matters. We need a good "base load" technology. Even with good batteries, there are areas that renewables can't help with, year round (e.g. the poles). IMO, some form of nuclear will be an important part of that base load. Especially, again IMO, LFTR plants. Anyway, my $.02... PS. I have no financial interest in anything discussed above.

I used to work as a technician in Grohnde PWR which was permanently shut down for political reasons after 38 years of reliable service on 31 December 2021. The build quality from Siemens was excellent and the plant repeatedly won global awards for maximum output. However, the inherent problem of a disaster unfolding due to cooling system failure is the Achilles heel of the PWR type cannot be denied. As soon as this risk can be eliminated in the design nuclear has a bright future as a supplier of reliable base load electricity.

There's an old adage that might reasonably be applied here; Don't put all your eggs in the same basket.