Re: Good but ...
The fire happened in a reactor dedicated to producing weapons-grade plutonium, not one of the civil power reactors
The British government has a bad habit of mixing up civilian and military nuclear installations which in turn results in military attitudes & safety levels being applied - which are extremely fast&loose compared to civil nuclear standards
Hence why nuclear waste was tossed down an old mine shaft.
"Small scale reactors" are subsidy sucking projects and they're mostly being pitched by outfits with a strong interest in military systems such as Rolls-Royce
You need enough steam to drive a 1GW turbine or the non-nuclear maintenace costs are very high (this is why coal/gas stations are almost all GW-class) and ideally you want that steam to be DRY or supercritical (at least 600C). LWR nuclear can produce 350C wet steam at best and that results in massive levels of turbine blade wear thanks to condensation inside the turbine causing pitting.
On top of that, LWR designs are essentially steam boilers with the hot bits actually immersed in the water - water is NOT a benign substance at these temperatuires and pressures (20-100 atm) and there have been several near misses due to corrosion. One of the nastiest was Bess-Davis in 2002 and it's worth looking up. the TLDR is that water ate its way through 9 inches of steel in 18 months, only being stopped by the pipework's chrome plating (what inspectors found inside the reactor was pretty bad too).
Engineering (burst) stresses on a boiler go up with the cube of the power. This is one of the reasons why railroads and factories moved away from steam as soon as alternatives were readily availabile - in the case of steam that meant moving to diesels only developing ~1/5 the power - 1500hp vs 8000hp)
Yes, Britian NEEDS to have a crash rollout program of nuclear power, but LWR is not the answer. The reason they're so stupidly expensive is that you need a massively strong reactor vessel (boiler) to handle the absurd energies being created (~3500MW) and last 60 years with zero maintenance, then you need an even more massively strong building to contain a potential burst.
There's also the weapons problem. LWR needs enriched uranium - which was used for the dual reasons that it was all that was available in 1953 and it allowed building a nuclear reactor small enough to fit in a submarine hull (Nautilus). The reason it was available at all is because enriched uranium is the unwanted waste product of making nuclear bombs - highly depleted uranium is processed into weapons-grade plutonium (which is what was being done when windscale caight fire). Nobody builds enriched uranium bombs because they cost hundreds of times more than plutonium ones (4-16 billion pounds apiece vs 20-60 million - weapons-grade U235 costs around £500 million/kg. Think about that when you realise there are 1-200kg in a submarine reactor. How much did those boats actually cost?)
If it wasn't for weapons nobody would bother with enriched uranium. It's perfectly feasibnle to build nuclear reactors that use natural uranium. You need more of it but not 500x more (natural uranium is ~$150/kg, 3% enriched "reactor grade" uranium is $65-80k/kg) - you get 9kg of depleted uranium for every 1kg of 3% enriched uranium and nobody's going to tolerate 89% wastage in a purely ciovil environment. In other words, where there's a reactor using enriched uranium, there's a weapons program lurking in the shadows and any handwringing about "enriched uranium" is a distraction from the real problem material.
Also: ALL designs using fuel rods are abuseable to make weapons plutonium. Fuel rods were originally used in the Manhattan Project's X10 plutonium reactors - whose design was tweaked by Alvin Weinberg to make the Shippingport/Nautilus reactors - as proof of concept laboratory demonstrators. Weinberg always envisaged something much safer for civil power and went on to achieve that in the ORNL MSRE - a design which isn't dependent on enriched uranium and was killed off in 1972 by Richard Nixon. Weinberg was kicked out of the USA Nuclear program..
Commercial operators dropped planning with LWR nuclear power in the early 1960s because it's more expensive than coal. It's even more expensive now. Weinberg's MSRE (LFTR) design was predicted to gost 20% of LWR to build and run, with 99% less waste and total immunity to the kinds of civil nuclear accidents we've seen over the decades (this was tested heavily in 1966-68). The most dangerous part of LWR nuclear power is the water and removing it makes things hundreds of times safer
Here's the fun part: at 80% cheaper than existing LWR, LFTR designs substantially undercut renewables. Britain will need ~65 nuclear plants eventualy. The reactoirs and containment are far smaller too - a reactor large enough to replace a coal station is 1/4 the size of the coal station's burners and hot enough to be drop=in replacements for those burners. It looks like China's been planning for this with its coal stations built over the last 20 years
Yes, the future is nuclear, but it will be driven by Weinberg's industrial prototype design (MSRE), not overgrown versions of his laboratory glassware one (Nautilus) - and right now the mid-late century leader looks like being CHINA (if things go the way I expect them to, they will be THE economic hyperpower from the 2040s onwards. I won't be alive to see it)
Fuelling is a separate issue, but moving to thorium would rescue the rare earth industry and allow a step change in electronics/magnetics/optics designs as currently very expensive and hard to obtain materials become cheap & common (like the way Aluminium changed after electrolysis smelting was developed)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
