Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), the great white hope of OLO’s nuclear enthusiasts, fail public liability and cost of security criteria.

See http://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=7a9318c0-aad6-405e-832f-66212a87d158&subId=669038

“Transport issues arising from the modular construction model are too often glossed over. Dr David Lowry notes that the UK’s so-called Expert Finance Working Group on Small Nuclear Reactors (EFWG)36

“makes no attempt to provide an analysis of how to provide market based insurance for SMRs, against accidents and terrorist attack on modules in transit to site and in situ; nor how to privately fund SMR radioactive waste management: yet these are real risks for nuclear power, SMRs included.

For example, the EFWG (p.11) talks of “road transportable modules which are easily installed on site” but makes no calculation of the exposure to disruption or indeed destruction of such an SMR module being transported on public roads from fabrication facility to operating site, possible hundreds of miles distant.”

Furthermore internal estimates indicate the size of the security protection unit (around 60 men and 10 attack dogs) for an SMR would be as expensive as that required for a large reactor.

Also the razor wire protected exclusion zones for SMRs would need to be as large as those for large reactors. Note population and siting concerns http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1687850713000071

Posted by plantagenet, Thursday, 26 March 2020 https://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=20808&page=4