Re: What about the operational costs?
The thought of a fresh-outa-college kid, a 35 MW reactor, and a loose-leaf folder en-titled 'How to handle a reactor scram' does not fill me with a lot of confidence
As Spazturtle has said, that won't be the case.
The big reactors, and the naval ones, are designed on the basis of having multiple safety systems and trained operators etc. The design intent with SMRs is that they will be fully automated and/or remotely operated and will simply shut down if there's a problem. But the key difference is inherent/intrinsic safety ...
In a PWR, you need a number of safety systems and operator procedures as they are inherently unsafe without them - though a water moderated reactor (as used in naval systems) has certain advantages in that it can't continue operating without the water being present. The SMRs are designed to be inherently or intrinsically safe - so if (for example) an "incident" removes all the external systems, it'll sit there, hotter than in normal operation, but will not "melt down" or release noxious stuff into the environment. The difference between inherent and intrinsic safety is (and I can't remember which way round it is) that with one, the reactor will remain safe but could be scrap because it's damaged, while with the other it'll also remain safe but will still be fully functioning once the issues are resolved.
So, for example, one design uses fuel that's in ceramic balls - in the event of losing cooling, it'll heat up (thus increasing heat losses through it's containment etc.), but the ceramic spheres will have a high enough melting point that they'll remain intact and thus contain all the noxious stuff.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
