hairytrog

IT kind of is true. Sure the death count directly attributable to nuclear reactors is low. But Fukushima caused the entire countries fleet to shut down - to the present day. Safety isn't about lives lost or health, it's about financial repurcussions of the accidents - both directly at the site (take a look at Fukushima today) and the effects on the wider industry, shutting down all the surrounding power plants, and forcing Japan to import fossils to compensate.

I think that's fair. I bet new large power plants will get the NuScale treatment and reduced exclusion zone though.

Molten-salt-fuel reactors, as described in this article, are so lame... "It's already melted, so you can't have a meltdown." lol. More seriously, molten-salt-cooled reactors have some promise. They use solid fuel, usually TRISO particles, and are cooled by molten salts, which we now have lots of experience with from solar salt power systems. If you are interested in molten-salt-cooled reactors outside of this lame press release - check out Kairos Power. Their website sucks butt. But they are the main player in molten salt-cooled reactors - funded by Henry Laufer of Renaissance Technologies. They actually have the engineering and financing to get one built, and are reportedly doing very well with NRC (unlike OKLO - lolz).

Not sure it's a justified reduction in exclusion zone. Yes they use natural circulation to get rid of decay heat if they lose power to run the pumps. BUT - they can't tolerate multiple reactors failing at once, they can't tolerate more than a few control rod withdrawals, and they can't tolerate clogging of the flow channels - Which to me, seem like reasonable accidents. The reduction in exclusion zone for NuScale is not really justified. If they get a reduction, you can expect the big ass reactors to also get a reduction...

Dark matter is probably a grouping of several phenomena like this. Should not discount MACHOs just because it doesn't explain all the dark matter observations. I think I remember reading in Carroll's Astrophysics Intro that MACHO's can explain about 10-20% of dark matter. Dark matter could be potentially be explained fully by multiple dark matter explanations, each adding to the overall phenomena.

This is not true. Every power plant that produces waste must pay money into the waste repository fund totaling nearly $50B - which is probably overkill for building a long term facility by a factor of 5 or more.

Nope. These reactors can be placed anywhere. They used air cooled condensers, which is only possible whe nyou have higher temperature heat than conventional light water reactors in use today. It's 350 degrees C versus 600 degrees C. So you can stick these in the desert no problem.