This is so clueless! Nuclear physics doesn't magically change when you make a reactor smaller, it actually massively increases the amount of deadly nuclear waste generated per kilowatt... Wire Magazine just did a full expose of this truth. Here's an excerpt:
"DESIGNING SMALLER REACTORS may make them easier to build, but it also creates a problem: neutron leakage. Reactors produce energy by firing neutrons at uranium atoms, causing them to split. This sends out more neutrons, which in turn find other targets and cause a chain reaction. But some of these neutrons miss. Instead, they fly out of the core, hitting other parts of the reactor that become “activated,” or radioactive. Inside SMRs, there’s less space for the neutrons to jostle around in, so more of them leak. There’s no getting around the issue. “We’re basically dealing with gravity here, the laws of physics,” Krall says. “It’s something you have to engineer your way around.”
One fix is to encase the core in materials like steel and graphite that reflect or reduce the speed of the neutrons rattling inside. But in time, these materials are being so thoroughly bombarded with neutrons that they become radioactive themselves, and need to be replaced. In addition, some of the reactor designs include sodium or liquid metal coolants that develop their own radioactivity issues. The authors point to experimental reactors in Scotland and Tennessee, where scientists have spent decades trying to figure out how to decommission parts that have become contaminated by the cooling systems. So that was the first problem Krall’s team found: The crowded conditions inside SMRs mean more neutron leakage, but the materials needed to contain such leaks inevitably become radioactive waste.
Problem number two is the fuel. The other major workaround for neutron leakage is to use fuel that’s more highly enriched with Uranium-235—the atoms that are actually split. But the researchers estimate that even with a greater concentration of atoms to hit, these reactors will end up with higher volumes of leftover fuel, given a lower rate of “burn up.” Once spent, the fuel needs to be handled with special care. With a higher concentration of fissionable atoms in the waste, its “critical mass”—that is, the amount of material to sustain a chain reaction—declines sharply, making the waste more volatile. The result is a bigger volume of material that needs to be divvied up into smaller batches for safe-keeping.
Those varied streams of waste complicate the calculus for a permanent storage facility, which needs to be carefully designed to ensure the surrounding geology can safely sequester the material for thousands of years." "And excerpt from new Wired article: https://www.wired.com/story/smaller-reactors-may-still-have-a-big-nuclear-waste-problem/
Please explain the inappropriate content below.
