Small Modular Reactors: The Model T Of Nuclear Energy | Answers With Joe

Small Modular Reactors are shipping container-sized reactors that can be scaled up to meet any energy need. And they may be the future of nuclear energy.

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[michaelshortland]

France has the cheapest power in Europe and 80% of it is Nuclear power. They built the same type of reactor in 16 or 19 places and it is a great success story.

[MikePSU]

"That's more."

Best laugh I've had on this channel in a while.

[jackthefrog]

"uranium is dangerous"
*Laughs in thorium

[briangarrow]

As a 19 year old student fresh out of a vocational training program and starting a trade union apprenticeship, one of my first jobs was working on the construction of a nuclear power plant. I was fortunate enough to get assigned to a variety of interesting parts of the facility including the containment structures, refueling buildings, and the reactor itself. Since that time over 40 years ago, I have built every other type of power plant that has been connected to the grid. If it produced power, I worked on it. Coal, refuse, biomass, hydro, natural gas, and solar are all the types I have built. As a rational person, I hope
these modular reactors are one of the solutions to the power needs of humanity.
And no, I haven’t forgotten about wind and tidal, which will also play a vital part of our energy future.

[kylemeyers]

I vote for "Yeah that more" to be Joe's new catch phrase.

[rumhave]

"Humans aren't very good and calculating risk."
The understatement of 2020/21

[prateembiswas]

"yeah thats more " has the potential to be a great meme template !!

[alethearia]

Thanks for this. My husband works in nuclear. It's so good to see positive and informative videos on the subject

[daveintaroom]

At 4:18, “Fukushima Disaster” - misleading image of something that defiantly wasn’t the reactor, very sneaky!

[Uveryahi]

Still laughing at the"yeah that's more". X) the delivery is perfect

[TheSwissGabber]

Comparing Nuclear and Solar on a /MWh basis is misleading, Solar needs storage to be usable.

[haldir]

When comparing numbers and quantities, the "yeah, that's more" has a visual element to the comparison that helps a lot in quickly getting the point across to the inside of the viewer's head. Keep doing it.

[jackielinde]

"I'm leaving a lot out." Yeah, I would say so. Like anything actually related to the cause:

- Three Mile Island Reactor #2 was a brand new reactor (Like only a year or two old).
- There was no switch or valve accidentally thrown to drain the cooling pond. It had a known problem with one of the cooling pumps that the previous night's crew tried to address. And it was this pump that started the incident when it failed and then took down the entire second cooling system with it. The cooling pond never emptied.
- The reactor was known to have issues with heat that was scheduled to be addressed later that year.
- The system had an antiquated system of notifying the staff of issues, faults, and warnings, including a printer hooked up to a 300 baud modem that couldn't keep up with the faults and alerts being sent to it and an inadequately designed warning light board.
- A crew that was trained on a completely different type of reactor situations (All were former US Navy submariners trained on reactors for nuclear subs.) who...
- Did the exact opposite of what they needed to do... initially. This caused the group to stop water from going into the containment vesicle initially because they were protecting the wrong part of the reactors.

Basically, it was the perfect storm of things going wrong that ultimately caused Reactor Number 2 to overheat and partially melt. (Yes, the reactor vessel and the fuel in it are now slag, but nothing anywhere close to what Chernobyl's elephant's foot was.) And the team was able to stop the meltdown by the time they got a hold of a rep for the company who made the reactor. It was a perfect storm of a brand new reactor in it's shakeout phase with a few known issues and some bad design flaws that lead to some complacency with the teams running it combined with a crew relying on procedures for a completely different environment, where if any of the variables had been slightly different, this wouldn't have happened.

[Betterhose]

I love nuclear power.
It has always been some kind of forbidden fruit. Something my parents never liked and didn't want to talk about.
Being a rebellious kid, I had to develop an interest in it.

[davidholland]

Thank you for continuing to educate about the realities of nuclear safety, SMRs, and the progress being made in this area of technology!

[jeromebarry]

INCLUDING high profile accidents, Nuclear is still the safest kilowatt available.

[redtapionellice]

Atomic
Small
Modular
Reactor

Sounds good to my ears

[andrealazzaro]

The "Fukushima Disaster" at 4:18 seems to involve more oil than I remembered. It did not know that the power plant looked like a oil refinery.

[scottwatrous]

One option I had thought of when looking at these being tall and almost rocket-like; if you could design units like this to fit into abandoned ICBM silos. The site areas are already sequestered and intended to mitigate fallout, and they're already hardened against catastrophe and attack. When the reactor needs major repair or replacement, it can be extracted onto a loading truck vertically, rotated into transport mode, and driven to a secure facility. And then a new one dropped into the hole to replace it. Of course almost all the ICBM sites are fairly remote so it would require some significant grid. But maybe there's ways to incorporate a similar idea to new construction if this model could be proven out using existing sites. Either way from a security standpoint those facilities were seriously monitored and designed to prevent tampering from even the best trained adversary. So while they could be left basically out in a field, it would be safe.

At the same time, why not fill the surrounding areas with tons of solar and/or wind? Take the site which might be 40 sq km and load the bulk of it with solar panels. But then spaced around would be individual silos with self contained reactors dropped in. Close enough to be efficient while spaced out far enough to prevent any issue with one affecting the other. Then put wind turbines up where it makes sense, (perhaps mounting them to cooling towers?) or even tap into some geothermal depending on conditions. That sort of combined power that looks like a solar farm but actually contains enough nuclear to match any large nuclear power plant, I could see that quickly and quietly gaining mainstream acceptance among the public. Because it would LOOK like green energy. And it honestly would be.

[CaseyBurnsInvesting]

Joe, answering the cool questions you never asked.