Nuclear 4.0 | The Small Modular Reactor Revolution

4:15 Supercriticality just means "reaction rate goes up", which is quite important when starting up a reactor. Increasing heat output is key for going from 'warm rock' to 'useful power plant'. It's just uncontrolled supercriticality which is bad.

Reactors in the 250-500MW range would be useful. I worked as a consultant for a Canadian power utility, who could have replaced their entire generation fleet with a couple of big reactors. It was not practical to do so because a typical large reactor is down for maintenance about 12 days a year. Taking a small modular reactor offline can be much more easily scheduled, if you have a fleet of them.

The Moltex Static Salt design does away with almost every hazard from traditional nuclear power. Its sheer simplicity and intrinsic safety should dramatically reduce costs. It’s also scaleable by building more reactors on the same site. It is naturally load following and and cannot over heat. Excessive temperature stops the nuclear reaction long before it becomes dangerous. It could be disconnected from load at full power and nothing nasty would happen. It has boron shut-down rods but they are not needed as an emergency tool. There is no water or steam in the core so no pressure and considerably less corrosion than we get in PWR cores. We should be moving heaven and earth to build these things. Instead we have an out of control nuclear regulator that completely stalled progress. Moltex is now getting the job done in Canada.

3-mile island failure was not dmging, just widely broadcasted by media and blown out of proportion. You can actually look up a list of failures and only 2 out of over 100 were dmging, there are over 400 total plants in operation as over 2023, but there have also been at least 100 that have been shut down in the 10yrs earlier. Every modern navy ship is nuclear powered, not one failure on those since their start of use.

@20:50 The lunar night is between 1.5 and 3.5 days? I don't think so. More like 14 to 15 days.

the fact that Yellow Cake is not just less expensive than Printer Ink, but it's a low single-digit percentage, seems to be bordering on something profound... 🤣

Galen Winsor said for years nuclear power was safe. He drank the water and swam in the cooling ponds. Died at an old age.

4:05 Super critical doesn't automatically mean bomb or else it would be impossible to get the reactor to produce more than decay heat. The whole runaway melting/boom thing has to do with prompt criticality and a bunch of fun physics.

20:18 "...in the northern hemisphere and so receive less sunlight." I'll remind you that the northern hemisphere starts at the equator, and covers one-half of the Earth. Cheers.

The 3+gen European EPR reactor is producing 1600MW so the SMR mention in this video need 21 reactors to produce the same amount of power. EPR is buildt at 8-9M$ for each Megawatt, but the failed Nuscale/Utah project clocks in at 20M$/Mwat. Nuclear is ridiculously expensive both at small or large scale. Even before waste handeling is considered.

Flammanville III in France was supposed to be online in 2012. So far it has not even had the fuel rods loaded. It was 5x over budget years ago.

10/10 for excitement 5/10 for technical knowledge, 2/10 for commercial application, 0/10 for future use of micro nuclear plants. We have major switchgear yards adjacent to previous nuclear plants. These are the ideal sites for re-siting without significant GRID restructuring. It is the GRID STRUCTURE that determines the future generation sites not the generator.

Bro...I got through the whole video and then heard "Westinghouse is also announcing their lunar base nuclear reactor" and I just had a sudden flash of a realization that the sci fi future we envisioned is easily within our lifetimes if we just play our collective cards right (far more hopeful than certain, but still)

Dr. Miles ignored the single biggest use case for mobile SMRs in the 50-80 MW range: commercial shipping.

I got 70% through this and still no mention of the Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (which we had working just fine over 50 years ago). Why is that?

“Just discovered your channel and I’ve already subscribed! You have a knack for explaining complex systems in a way that’s easy to understand, even for someone with little prior knowledge. Keep up the great work!”

Nuclear power brings down electricity prices by 75% in Finland.

Another use would be backup power for facilities like hospitals or military bases. Places that are connected to the grid, but need to be immune to broader power outages or shortages. Normally it just sits there, selling power to the grid to offset its own purchase price. But if the day ever comes when it's needed, you've got megawatts available for any length of time you might want. In that use case, the fact that it's potentially more expensive than the alternatives is irrelevant, because you're only paying the difference to have guaranteed power on demand.

Another market for micro-reactors, is for self-consumption industrial use (e.g., manufacturing and tech). Tech companies are little more open to risk taking, exploring new technologies, esp. if they are low carbon. They. also have deep pockets and can take the early adopter premium. The growth of data centers, increasing energy use from AI, presents another use case, guaranteed uptake, to jumpstart a new industry.

It's also happening in Europe, a Polish, mostly government owned oil company called Orlen, which mostly makes gas stations, announced a year ago that they wil put SMRs near cities to power them, sadly I didn't hear anything about them for a long time other than them planning to do it before 2030 so I don't know if they will actually do it