this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
67 points (97.2% liked)

Canada

9340 readers
2220 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I guess from a physics standpoint, one would expect an SMR to be somewhat less fuel efficient in that a nuclear reactor is essentially a furnace and the surface area to volume ratio favours a larger design to retain the heat. SMR proponents like to spin this as a "feature", however, in that they would be less likely to meltdown and that safety trumps efficiency in reactor design. Another point they claim from the safety standpoint is that if you had say a dozen SMRs replacing a single traditional reactor, you could routinely take one off-line for inspection/maintenance without a huge hit on power generation.

I don't know enough about this and most of what I read is anecdotal though, so take it with a grain of salt. There may still be a case for them in northern communities, many of which are off the grid and use large diesel/gas generators? I guess it would depend on how well SMRs can follow load, which has tended to be a problem with nuclear power.