I'm not sure exactly what you mean by these. Can you expand on that? (I mostly mean the centralization, but also looking for clarity on what you mean by security)

[–] Blake@feddit.uk 22 points 2 years ago (6 children)

For centralisation - large areas of the grid are dependent on a few locations, so if there is an issue with one or two areas, the entire network can fail. Say for example if there is an earthquake which disables two nuclear power plants, that could cause massive issues with the grid.

If you have many small power sources distributed across a larger area, it significantly mitigates the issue - the loss of even dozens or hundreds of wind turbines would be able to be handled much more responsively.

Nuclear is uniquely disadvantaged at having very bad responsiveness to demand. Renewables are extremely good at that, coincidentally.

For security, I'm sure you can imagine many scenarios, but nuclear waste is a potential target for creating dirty bombs for example.

[–] DahGangalang 9 points 2 years ago

First off appreciate the good faith response. It's more than I've come to expect when I ask (probably) dumb questions requesting further explanation.

Coming from an American perspective, I've only recently realized just how badly centralization affects the grid. It's definitely a strong case for rooftop solar.

But focusing on nuclear, I do think we've missed the window where building top-to-bottom nuclear generating facilities would be advantageous, but in the effort to bridge from our heavily fossil fuel based electrical grid to a completely renewable, I think that SMRs are a reasonable solution. I especially like the notion of converting old infrastructure (i.e. old abandoned coal plants) into SMR power plants.

You seem to be knowledgeable and have opinions. What're you're thoughts on SMRs to help bridge the growing energy need?

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