This looks promising. The field has needed innovation for a long time, and the NRC has been holding it back.
7 thoughts on “Small Nuclear Reactors”
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This looks promising. The field has needed innovation for a long time, and the NRC has been holding it back.
Comments are closed.
Unfortunately, this idiot thinks this tech is just in time for the “climate crisis”. Doesn’t do much for his credibility.
Treat it as Obligatory Flowery Closing™ for any science article: the Great God Gaia must be appeased by a ritual invoking of the Global Warming Prayer. Several years ago the deities .Com (Dot Com) and Nano-(this and that) had to have their ritual mentions.
You can’t publish anything without the obligatory kowtow to the “climate crisis”. I expect it will be revised to somehow blame Trump momentarily.
You can see the same flourishes if you dig back through the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Some of the early papers would relate some observations of the natural world and then conclude with a paragraph or two connecting them to the greatness of God. Some are really bizarre, such as “A letter concerning the proper caliber of military ordnance and an observation that the human soul is nothing but fire.”
I suspect the constant references to global warming in the past few decades won’t age well, either.
For many, many years now, the NRC seems to have perceived its function as being to retard rather than facilitate the development of nuclear technology. I guess there is a greater sense of power in that, or maybe it is purely ideological.
“I am skeptical of the ability to license advanced nuclear reactors and deploy them on a scale that would make a difference for climate change,” adds Fetter. “But I think it’s worth exploring because they’re a centralized form of carbon-free electricity and we don’t have a lot of those available.”
Eh? These paired statements make no sense if you believe there is a “climate emergency”. Why waste the time and resources exploring a dead-end Professor Fetter?
I’d prefer to explore them for their own merits. Esp. for running a Lunar or Mars colony.
I’ve been seeing these stories for over a decade but there is never a product to purchase. The first one I saw had a baseball sized nuclear material to run it. This was reportedly taken from “spent” rods from traditional reactors.