and they could be an abundance source of energy, but why has only one been so far built? i mean, and he says, thanks for watching and stay with us the so you don't think you the same way you expect and more different things from life than your parents. i just want to pursue was that's my thought was fired or you think your kid is 2 different, risky, irresponsible, reasonable stop in port is not i want my son to become a doctor to in the clubs. it's time to, to get from your generation with a sleep asked and then when generations flash on

this kind of fun, it feels like therapy the this is supposed to be the next big hope for nuclear energy. it promises to fix all the problems with the additional nicea power, making it cheaper, faster, and easier to build. smaller, safer modular units, a game changer for nuclear going forward. it's called a small modular reactor and over the past few decades, well then 80 stops in projects. they've been working on this futuristic vision. but there's one big problem. so far, any one has actually been built. there reasons why it's more than what your director is not being built even though many people are talking about them. you've . how is in the spotlight again as well, rushes to find clean energy alternatives as a modest could be a really useful tool for doing things that big nuclear plants come through yet. and

they have a leg up for many of us because they could provide constant power everywhere. but after decades of new to the decline, western countries are really struggling to make this technology work. and developing countries like china and russia and india seem to be pulling ahead fast . so some of us deserve all this hype and how can we actually make them happen? powell is a very divisive topic with a lot of strong arguments for and against the technology. it's a powerful low carbon alternative to fossil fuels. and unlike renewables like solar and wind, which fluctuate based on the weather, nuclear as a consistent output. the i. e, a, an international body that advises governments and the transition to clean energy physically has to more than double by 2050. if we want any chance of reaching that 0. that the problem is new to you is that it's really big and expensive. takes too long to build and could cause civilization ending disaster in the seventy's and in leading up to the eighty's, there was high public support. dr. cra,

he could go to research as public support for nuclear energy in the united states and india. that momentum really crashed us through the eighty's and ninety's with the a journal 3 mile island. incidence that happened, we made a video on the rise and fall of nuclear energy as a tool to fight climate change, which you can watch, you know, k ran as you really struggle to bounce back from those big dis, austin's. and when the focus, shame and nuclear accident happened in 2011, the industry's credibility took another massive hit. but things are starting to look up again. public support has maybe started trickling back to pre fukushima levels and support is even higher for small moduler other type of advanced reactor technologies. that might be because a lot of these simmons have some very flashy advertising. westinghouse, 8300 small modular react. they're pointer as to more power plants while there are lots of different s m,

i was being developed is currently full main types each using a different coolant to manage the extreme heat of a nuclear efficient reaction. they are light water, high temperature gas liquid metal in molten salt simmons. the most common type though is light water reactors. it's very similar to traditional nuclear power plants, which are almost all water cold. that makes the much easier to design and get approved. as today's nuclear, galatians mostly based on water cools reactance. so for light water reactors, the idea is to take a big traditional nuclear power plant, shrinking down and mass producing it would work very much like airliners. dr. adam stein is an engineering research on consultant who focuses on nuclear energy instead of how we typically build most nuclear power plants in the past, which is completely from scratch, easily mostly at the power plant site. if you think of a large jumbo jet, it's built in the factory in a consistent manner with the same parts every time. with rigorous quality control.

dr. steins as making in a factory means you can keep the same specialized workforce, the same supply chain and the same standards and just ship the already made power plant to wherever it needs to go. the small plants would have a much smaller output than a full size nuclear reactor. most definitions of a, some us put them anywhere up to $300.00 megawatts. which means today's average full size nuclear reactors, output molding triple the biggest as a month. but an exchange, they take up very little space. nuclear already uses the least amount of land amongst low carbon energy sources by farm. instead, boss could take that to the next level and use go. one of the biggest small developers claims that this pelton the void to 12 would take up 0.13 square kilometers of land, but could output the equivalent of 18.6 square kilometers of solar panels. so that could get nuclear power online in more places much faster. what about the risk of nuclear accidents? well, as miles have an answer for that too,

and it's called passive safety, or nearly all of today's nuclear power plants, the biggest safety task is keeping the quote of the reactor cooling off. if the plant suddenly shuts down and stops making power. if the cold and stop circulating for long enough, the fuel will get too hot and meltdown. that creates the risk of leaking radioactive material into the surrounding area. if all the material doesn't stay contained in the cool, that's what happened at the foot machine by dice, you plant in 2011 after and it was quite triggered a safety shut down. the plant automatically switch to its backup generators to keep the coolant circulating through pumps. but an hour later, a massive tsunami treated by the os quite wiped out the plants, backup systems and 3 react his notes down. so to avoid this type of scenario menu, a generation power plants use passive and self contained safety systems that don't rely on human operators or external power is of purchasing a safer than previous models. and many small safety designs claim to be completely passively cooled without the need for any external water. either to do that,

they would use a natural force called conviction, which is basically the same thing that happens in a kettle. when liquids and gases get hot, they rise to the top and when they cool, they sink to the bottom, creating a loop to take advantage of conviction. these estimates have a series of chambers that can allow for passive circulation of water. the reactor cool is placed inside a lodger shell, which is submerged in water in a containment structure on the ground. in an emergency, the nuclear reaction which generates heat would shut down in the reactor would close itself off, not letting anything in or out. so to get rid of the remaining heat inside, the cool, conduction comes in as the water inside the coil hate stop. it rises to the top, turns into steam and gets pushed out into the largest shelves, which is kept cool from the water. it's of motion. that steam hits the lodge shell, condenses back into water and pulls at the bottom. ready to flow back into the reactor and continue the cycle inferior. that cycle can just keep going until the reactor cools down enough to no longer be a threat. but while there's

a lot of hype around these innovative designs, the likelihood of s, a mazda actually looking out depends a lot on how you look at them. who are they like any other type of entity souls standing on their own feet and making a profit in the free market? well, i think a strategic asset. the governments can use to fill the gaps while these things out of fossil fuels, even if they lose money building. analysts say that 1st way is the approach in the us and a huge sofa hasn't worked out too well. it was just too expensive that stuff to fredericka freeze a physicist, a nuclear energy research a. she says that despite a so just some ost option projects in the us in europe. over the past decade. small nikia has run into the same problems as big nuclear with heavier regulations, project delays and costs blow out. and because it's smaller, it also makes less money as an os. um, it was the economy of scale in energy production. that the smaller the output, the less revenue you can make. so you have to have really tailored applications do

this really, really small market. when you enter the rising inflation and increasing costs of a central materials to make these plants like steel, you get arrested piece of financial meltdown. that happened last november to new scale. one of the 1st and most promising small startups. and the only one with us regulatory approval of to decades of planning the company cancelled its 1st as a deployment over act. as an idaho, you scale us as a project called the c a p. p based, unique challenges and ended due to a lack of subscriptions. but many analysts say increasing costs played a big part. no scan was supposed to be buildable, united states, which as long history and know through problems that has the biggest. so the fleet and still it did not work on to tell us like, um, support from the government support from the regulatory authority. still it did not work out. it was just too expensive. the price tech was like to kind of our thing at the end about $4.00 times than what they usually have at convention,

looked at 4 plans right now. a new skills president says the company is continuing with its other domestic and international customers to bring americans some off to market, including a project to replace the deacon mission, to copeland in romania with a void some opposite. but new scale is an example of how tough it is for private companies and stocks in the west to get small money to react is going. so what about that 2nd approach? looking at some of those as a strategic national investment that might not necessarily make a lot of money. that's the approach taken by countries like china and russia. small projects almost entirely state run operated by national companies like china, c and c, and russia's rows at home in the past. countries that were able to build nuclear power successfully and have those be successful. industrial investments were ones that were able to control their costs by avoiding unnecessary regulatory burdens, and then also control revenue by allowing them to make sure they could compete effectively on the down stream that they could sell into

a market and be assured of a reasonable rate of return for selling power. that's dave efficient in economics and policy analysts to specializes in china is introduced back to countries like tied to right now. they do a great job controlling costs upstream and they do an excellent job ensuring revenue for the power sales downstream. that's because even if you have a great design for an us a month extra, it's a quite a few different steps have to come together to make it will happen. is the materials needed to build the facility? you all have to be certified as nuclear se. then there's a workforce to build the plan and the workforce to operate and then there's getting the fuel needed to run the react, serrato's. and all of these steps being done by different private companies who all need to make a profit. countries like china and rush off, package up all of the steps and sell them as a bundle. it's not just the technology you're getting, it's also coming with the entire supply chain solution. it's coming with the uh, with the low interest loans that are provided by the export and companies banks, right. maybe the import export bank of china is getting a big low interest. well and something like that. and for the current environment,

it feels like that's just much more compact tests. and fishermen says that approach has allowed some of projects in china to keep moving even when they run into challenges. in 2019 chinese national new corporation begin to work on a 125 megawatt smile project on hang on the island holding low one. it's scheduled to be finished by the end of 2026, which would make it the 1st commercial land based somehow in the world. and that strategic national investment approach could also make some estimates that have really nation uses more likely to look out to like high temperature gas cold or molten salt reactors, which are currently some of the only alternatives to cold for industrial processes that need a lot of heat like making foods and then or chemicals. we made a video and molten salt reactors and for him you can watch him. so that's the end of the story, right? state run projects have a solution that will finally get some walls happening, and soon they'll be hundreds of react is being built and shipped all over the world . not quite. there are still a lot of questions hanging up as

a mazda and need to be answered before the dream of factory built new care can come . sure. the world's energy needs are increasing rapidly, and we're still a long way away from nets air emissions. so well that's the most do have that uses some experts say countries at the site to invest more nuclear a more lucky to me because lot smaller plants, china is going to do better than everybody else and it's still and they're going to have this kind of impact on the di, carbonized ation journey, and on the offsetting of coal attorney and well public opinion on you can't use improving the idea of having thousands of small nuclear plants all over the world, raises concerns for something about how all that a waste is going to be managed sama, some of designs have close to fuel cycles. that could be read the last up to 30 years. but the science is still out on that. and some studies have shown that somebody's using more, not less new fuel overall. are still many advocates point out that we're probably going to need nuclear for a lot longer than 2050 or whenever we manage to reach that 0 volts population in

engine needs are going to keep rising. and the strategy of using nuclear low side renewables looks like it's here to stay. so what do you think of a small nuclear reactors that us know in the comments and subscribe to our channel? we released new videos for you every friday. the clear is view of the outer space huge students go in the to land at to come and visit, unveil spectacular images of volume and soon the greatest to see even the extremely telescope e l t begins a new chapter in astronomy tomorrow. today, next on d, w, there's a note just to have

a site just to make the right decision to dw in you know, follow the what do you think he's trying to tell us? being able to talk to our fellow creatures is an old dream. on one that still seems a long way off, even with our closest evolution re cousins. but the chimpanzees have something like the language. and if they do, could we decide to where it would that help us to better understand them? that's an older exciting topics this week in dw signing show. welcome to tomorrow. today humans can.