Comments by "David Elliott" (@davidelliott5843) on "Small Modular Reactors Explained - Nuclear Power's Future?" video.

  1. Nuclear power has killed less than 100 people since 1954 when the industry began. That’s almost entirely down to Chernobyl. Three Mile Island and Fukushima killed nobody.
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  2. Large scale PWR reactors are really not big. But the concrete screening and containment is huge. Additionally there are huge costs for the active safety systems.
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  3. Water is always an issue inside a nuclear reactor. The list of hazards to be controlled by active systems is huge. Here’s three - Steam expands 1000x compared to hot water. Hot water is actually more corrosive than molten chloride salts. Radiation and neutrons crack the water into hydrogen and oxygen. That’s a big safety issue. Above all, nuclear needs design simplicity. Elon Musk is famous for saying “the best part is no part at all”. The huge value of molten chloride salts like Moltex and Elysium is they just don’t have the hazards of pressurised water. They are incredibly simple. They are built to burn the waste from PWRs and they denature the fissile isotopes avoiding proliferation issues. They take waste with a 1/2 life of 30,000 years and create a waste with just 30 years half life. Apart from being low cost they solve the waste storage issues. PWR waste remains radioactive for 300,000 years. Moltex and Elysium waste needs just 300 years to reach background. Due to the exponential decay curve, most of that time the rad levels are very low.
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