Australia needs to move from ‘fear to facts’ on small nuclear modules
I do think nuclear is the way we need to go but not small modular reactors, or at least not the designs I am familiar with that tend to use fuel pellets encapsulating U-235 fuel in silicon-carbide modules. The advantage of this approach is it's cheap. The disadvantage is that it is not scalable and creates a SEVERE long term nuclear waste problem because silicon carbon has a very high melting point AND is chemically very stable making reprocessing of spent fuel basically impossible. Because U-235 is only .7% of the natural Uranium and because Uranium is only one third as plentiful as Thorium, it is a poor fuel choice. In my view, LFTR's or liquid fluoride molten salt breeder reactors are a MUCH more sane long term solution because they initially need a fissile fuel to get them going such as U-235 but after start-up they can breed their own fuel from U-238, Thorium-233, or various actinides that constitute the long life nuclear waste problem from today's reactors. Further, because they aren't pressurized they don't need expensive containment buildings and because they are passively safe, that is their reaction rate is self-limiting and even if they were to overheat, they melt a melt plug and the fuel simply drains into a larger melt tank where it is in a large enough area that the reaction stops. Because in such reactors, fission products are continuously removed, there are no substantial amounts of fission products in the fuel so the fuel does not continue to generate heat in that state. Thus these reactors are inherently safe. Lastly their fuel cycle produces neither waste suitable for bomb material (which is why the US government has for so long made licensing of them difficult) nor long lived actinides, but rather only short lived fission products that decay to a level of radioactivity no higher than the ores they originated from within 300 years. These are advantages that SMR's do not have.
Australia needs to move from ‘fear to facts’ on small nuclear modules
Siyeva Consulting Principal Adi Paterson says Australia needs to move from “fear to facts” around small nuclear modules and from the “fable about renewables”...YouTube
