Tonight: I pontificate in forums. Then: Copypaste to show I still have keys to the blog.

Topic: Aren’t kittens cute and wubbly

Page: 36 

[QUOTE=Cadbury;8295096]Dont buy the hype. A well made mini reactor is extremely safe. It cant blow up. It cant irradiate several city blocks. At worst, some radioactive coolant might leak out – requiring a cleanup crew.[/QUOTE]

I essentially agree with you, at least regarding the safety of these reactors in normal operation. However, what if somehow – maybe 50 years down the track, if we’re still here – some nefarious agent gets hold of the ‘depleted’ material in the core? Mother Russia built modular nuclear powerplants back in the day, to power autonomous lighthouses and whatnot. There’s a bunch left unaccounted for. Decades after the fact, a small group of hunters/trappers came across a discarded (still happily radiating) beryllium heater core from one of those bad boys, dragged it to their camp for warmth and died, hard, for the convenience. The incident was not isolated.
That anecdote is paraphrased from a New Scientist I read last year, dredge it up in their archives if you want. The point is not that nuclear powerplants are bad, or unsafe, and certainly not unreliable – it’s that the material they contain can and will be rendered extremely lethal in the wrong hands. It should not be packaged up in a block of concrete under some apartment building, where it can be lost and forgotten far more readily than a massive central reactor.
Worst-case scenario: Global warming may kill us all, sure. Nuclear war will, and then it’ll salt the earth so nothing will ever grow again (with poetic license). Let China burn coal.