• Hellgruen@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    I concede the nuclear warheads part. Still true fir a lot of countries tho.

    The fun thing about smr is that investors are fleeing and the start ups are going bancrupt. Additionally when the nuclear power plants were initially developed they had to upscale the to high size because the big overhead of maintenance, safety measures and poor yield from heat power coupling only gives a small net power output. So to make it work they had to make it big. Now they try to make it small again. Apart from some niche use they won’t make a big difference.

    • Photonic@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      You’re comparing technology of the 1980s to today’s technology. Nuclear power research has come a long way since then.

      Part of the reason NPPs (as in, conventional PWRs, as we use in the west) had to be so big is the giant containment structure to keep pressurised water inside the reactor. Molten salt does not need to be pressurised and is much more efficient because it runs at much higher temperatures than water does. So these two technologies combined definitely have the ability to reduce the size of NPPs.