An SMR is to a PWR (Neil Alexander) Canada

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An SMR is to a PWR what a Smartphone is to Semaphore Neil Alexander October 25, 2017

Ok so that is an exageration.....I needed to grab your attention....and it appears that i have succeeded.

A Small Modular Reactor (SMR) is though to a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) what a 70inch, intelligent, curved, flat screen HD TV is to a Cathode Ray TV that occupies half the living room, has a screen the size of a postcard (Ok I am exaggerating again but I think I can exercise some artistic licence) and which may or may not have colour.

To make this point in a presentation I took a classic slide of nuclear power development and superimposed the other technologies of the time. It's done from memory rather 1

than research so there may be errors but it is broadly correct and the story it tells is appropriate.

Even though I knew what I wanted to achieve, and had lived through much of it, it surprised me.

Shortly after the second world war something that was developed entirely for military use was repurposed. The fundamental science had only been established mere years beforehand but within a decade research was undertaken, designs developed, licenses secured and plants were built. Civilian nuclear power was born.

As with many immature technologies there were many different concepts developed in parallel.

One of those very first plants was built at Chernobyl.

Armed with newly acquired construction and operation experience, nuclear scientists and engineers focused on the successes and went back to their slide rules and log tables (no calculators yet) to design what became known as the generation II plants. Many of these generation II plants operated for their full 40 year life and then got life extensions to 60 years. Some may get an extension to 80 years.

The equivalent longevity for the car industry would have seen us going to the disco in the model T's our Grandfathers bought, being careful not to get oil on our white flares when we crank started them (the cars that is not the flares...not sure how you crank a flare).

We had already started using the by-products from the industry for radiation therapies to treat cancer. (Side note...the nuclear industry has successfully treated many orders of magnitude more cancers than it has caused).

With nuclear plants being expensive to design the watchword became evolution not revolution and the third generation that makes up the majority of the existing nuclear fleet was born. It is possible that some scientists and engineers working on the early generations might have taken their work home to run programs, they developed from scratch, on their recently acquired Commodore 64s.

The plants being proposed today benefit from an entire lifetime of the development of the science, more than half a century of operational experience and calculation tools that allow an entire plant to be built in a virtual world, and put through the worst imaginable events, without anyone moving out of range of an automatic expresso machine.

(Remember when we used to have to make coffee?).

And these new technologies are, not surprisingly, very different to what we have seen in the past. Reactors operating at not much more than atmospheric pressure using molten salts as a coolant. Reactors that use pelleted "TRISO" fuel that can never reach a temperature where containment integrity is lost. Reactors that can consume nuclear 2

waste or transmute other elements into fuel. All producing power with negligible emission of greenhouse gases.

So when someone says we shouldn't develop new nuclear technologies because there were some problems in the past, tell them that that is like deciding not to develop the Dreamliner because the Wright flyer was too draughty.

Wright Flyer 3